tied with a string, which was inharmonious; for the composition of the whole man denoted buckles. Round his neck, without the slightest appearance of collar, was wound tight, a snowy white handkerchief of Indian muslin. In fact, with the exception of his face and hands, the whole colouring of Sandy Woodyard, as the people improperly called him, was either black or white. His face, though thin and sharp as a ferret's, was somewhat rubicund. Indeed, if any blood ever got up there, it could not well get out again, with that neckcloth tied round his throat, like a tourniquet: and the hands themselves were also reddish; but by no means fat, showing large blue veins, standing out, like whipcord in a tangle. To gaze upon him, he was a very awful looking person; to hear him talk, one would have supposed him an embodied storm; so fierce were his denunciations, so brutal his objurgations. But he had several good qualities, with a few bad ones. He was an exceedingly good surgeon, a very learned man, and the most sincere man upon earth--except when he was abusing a patient or a friend, to their face. Then, indeed, he said a great deal that he did not mean; for he often told the former, when refractory, that they would die and he hoped they would, when he knew they would not, and would have given his right-hand to save them; and, the latter, he not unfrequently called fools and blackguards, where, if they had been the one or the other, they would not have been his friends at all. When Mr. Alexander Woodyard entered the room, in the head-gardener's cottage, he gazed, first at the boy, and then at Chandos, demanding, in a most irate tone, "What the devil have I been sent here for?--Who is ill?--What's the matter, that I should be disturbed in the very midst of the dissection of a field-mouse in a state of torpidity?" "If you are the surgeon, Sir," replied Chandos, "I suppose it was to see this little boy that you were disturbed. He has--" "Don't tell me what he has," replied Mr. Woodyard. "Do you suppose I don't know what he has better than you. Boy, put out your tongue.--Does your head ache?--Let me feel your pulse." The boy did not seem to comprehend him at all; neither put out his tongue, nor his wrist, and gazed at the old man with big eyes, full of terror. "There, don't be a fool, little man," said the surgeon, taking him by the arm, and making him shrink with pain. "Oh, oh! that's it, is it? So, you have luxated your shoulder. We'll soon put it in, my dear. Don't be afraid! You are a brave boy, I dare say." "That he is," answered Chandos; "for it was in endeavouring to defend General Tracy from a bull, which had knocked him down, that he got tossed and hurt."