nor played skittles, after a moment's pause, he told her that his hard-earned pence should not be wasted in maintaining a “circulating library.” Was there ever injustice like this? Talk to a man with one meal a day about gluttony, lecture the castaway at sea about not giving way to his appetites, you might just as well do so as to preach to Mrs. Dill--with her one book, and who never wanted another--about the discursive costliness of her readings. Could it be that, like the cruel jailer, who killed the spider the prisoner had learned to love, he had resolved to rob her of Clarissa? The thought was so overwhelming that it stunned her; and thus stupefied, she saw the doctor issue forth on his daily round, without venturing one word in answer. And he rode on his way,--on that strange mission of mercy, meanness, of honest sympathy, or mock philanthropy, as men's hearts and natures make of it,--and set out for the “Fisherman's Home.” CHAPTER IX. A COUNTRY DOCTOR In a story, as in a voyage, one must occasionally travel with uncongenial companions. Now I have no reason for hoping that any of my readers care to keep Dr. Dill's company, and yet it is with Dr. Dill we must now for a brief space foregather. He was on his way to visit his patient at the “Fisherman's Home,” having started, intentionally very early, to be there before Stapylton could have interposed with any counsels of removing him to Kilkenny. The world, in its blind confidence in medical skill, and its unbounded belief in certain practitioners of medicine, is but scantily just to the humbler members of the craft in regard to the sensitiveness with which they feel the withdrawal of a patient from their care, and the substitution of another physician. The doctor who has not only heard, but felt Babington's adage, that the difference between a good physician and a bad one is only “the difference between a pound and a guinea,” naturally thinks it a hard thing that his interests are to be sacrificed for a mere question of five per cent. He knows, besides, that they can each work on the same materials with the same tools, and it can be only through some defect in his self-confidence that he can bring himself to believe that the patient's chances are not pretty much alike in _his_ hands or his rival's. Now Dr. Dill had no feelings of this sort; no undervaluing of himself found a place in his nature. He regarded medical men as tax-gatherers, and naturally thought it mattered but little which received the impost; and, thus reflecting, he bore no good will towards that gallant Captain, who, as we have seen, stood so well in his daughter's favor. Even hardened men of the world--old footsore pilgrims of life--have their prejudices, and one of these is to be pleased at thinking they had augured unfavorably of any one they had afterwards learned to dislike. It smacks so much of acuteness to be able to say, “I was scarcely presented to him; we had not exchanged a dozen