And Grindley, again, was just as bad; indeed, I don’t know whether he wasn’t worse than any of them. He has got his house full of musical instruments of every sort and description, and can’t play as much as ‘God Save the Queen’ on any one of them. He is always talking of “staccatoes,” and “fugues,” and “musical intervals,” and “thorough bass,” and I don’t know what all, though his voice is like a cracked penny-trumpet, and he has no more idea of joining in a chorus than a jackass. He went about the town boring everybody by squeaking out with his voice that was enough to set your teeth on edge, “I say, won’t it be nice if the New Doctor should be musical?” I suppose though, that after all nobody was so much interested about the new-comer as the young unmarried ladies,—except the middle-aged unmarried ladies, who were more interested still. I don’t blame them, poor creatures! for really it is very little chance they have of getting husbands at Mudford, except when strangers or visitors come to the place. There are some half-dozen families or so certainly, whose pure _ichor_ is so superior to the vulgar blood that runs, or stagnates, in the veins of the common inhabitants of Mudford, who do occasionally intermarry, once in ten or fifteen years or so, like the royal families of Europe, when a prince and princess of their illustrious houses happen to be of a marriageable age at the same time. The coincidence is of rare occurrence, but it does happen occasionally. And the boys and girls of the utterly plebeian class, of course, here as elsewhere, walk out together in the evenings, and on Sunday afternoons; and the young farmer lads in the neighbourhood, and the young masons, and all those, go courting to the servant-maids in the evenings, at the back-doors and in the back-kitchens; and they get married before they know what they are about. But with the middle classes it is different; and I don’t see that the poor girls have got a chance, except when some friend or relative at a distance will have them on a visit, or when a stranger happens to come into the town;—rare chances these. As for the young men of the place, who have been flirting with ’em, and kissing ’em, and seeing ’em flirted with and kissed by brother Jack and cousin Tom, and all the rest, ever since they were children, why, they would as soon think of seeing anything a fellow could fall in love with in their own sisters. (I speak, as every one will understand, of those who have no money; the few that have, of course, nobody can help loving, and they go off fast enough.) And so it happens that any fresh young man, coming into the town, is to these poor creatures quite a god-send: and though we know nothing else of the New Doctor, it had been ascertained, beyond a doubt, through old Mole, that he was young and unmarried.