The eccentric Dr. Glyn of Cambridge, rarely dined, but used to satisfy his hunger at chance times by cutting slices off a cold joint (a constant ornament of the side-table in his study), and eating them while standing. To eat such a dinner in such an attitude would be to fare little better than the ascetic physician who used twice a week to dine off two Abernethy biscuits, consumed as he walked at the pace of four miles an hour. However wholesome they may be, the hard biscuits, known as Abernethies (but in the construction of which, by-the-by, Abernethy was no more concerned than were Wellington and Blucher in making the boots that bear their names), are not convivial cates, though one would rather have to consume them than the calomel sandwiches which Dr. Curry (popularly called Dr. Calomel Curry) used to give his patients. CHAPTER IX. FEES. From the earliest times the Leech (Leighis), or healer, has found, in the exercise of his art, not only a pleasant sense of being a public benefactor, but also the means of private advancement. The use the churchmen made of their medical position throughout Christendom (both before and after that decree of the council of Tours, A.D. 1163, which forbade priests and deacons to perform surgical operations in which cauteries and incisions were employed), is attested by the broad acres they extracted, for their religious corporations, as much from the gratitude as from the superstition of their patients. And since the Reformation, from which period the vocations of the spiritual and the bodily physician have been almost entirely kept apart, the practitioners of medicine have had cause to bless the powers of sickness. A good story is told of Arbuthnot. When he was a young man (ere he had won the patronage of Queen Anne, and the friendship of Swift and Pope), he settled at Dorchester, and endeavoured to get practice in that salubrious town. Nature obviated his good intentions: he wished to minister to the afflicted, if they were rich enough to pay for his ministrations, but the place was so healthy that it contained scarce half-a-dozen sick inhabitants. Arbuthnot determined to quit a field so ill-adapted for a display of his philanthropy. "Where are you off to?" cried a friend, who met him riding post towards London. "To leave your confounded place," was the answer, "for a man can neither live nor die there." But to arrive at wealth was not amongst Arbuthnot's faculties; he was unable to use his profession as a trade; and only a few weeks before his death he wrote, "I am as well as a man can be who is gasping for breath, and has a house full of men and women unprovided for."