same suit of black, the same black necktie, and the same scrupulously clean linen and glossy hat. Altogether, I was pleased with the New Doctor: there was certainly nothing brutal nor sensual in his appearance, and he did not look at all like a man who would——. But I must not anticipate. I do not know how, or whence, or when the rumour first took its rise, but not long after Mr Smith’s arrival it began to be whispered about that there was something very queer, to say the least, about him. The mysterious manner of his arrival probably first gave rise to this rumour, and afterwards there were many things to increase the impression it had made. As I have said, Mr Smith at first rarely came out; and he never seemed to try or wish to get a patient. Indeed, when those two wild scamps, young Bones and young Skinner, going home late as usual, knocked him up about one o’clock in the morning, and said that he must go at once to Mr Cheeks of Little Pigton, some four miles off across the moors, who was very ill, he told them very blandly and courteously that he had no horse, and was just going to bed, and that they had better call Mr Green or Mr Higgins. I must say, I think that Green and Higgins need not have been so bitter against him, nor have called him “quack” so often as they did, especially as Green never passed the Hall in his life, and only got through the college by the skin of his teeth; and what Higgins’s qualifications are, except impudence, I believe nobody ever knew. As a matter of course, they are at daggers-drawn between themselves, as medical men in small towns always are, and say all sorts of disparaging things of each other,—for which nobody can blame them, as there is truth on both sides—but they certainly had no right to speak of Mr Smith as they did; at all events, at first, before those matters which I am about to relate were openly talked of.