"Well, you know, Pringle was here, and hospitality you know, Deb, hospitality you know--" "Hospitality won't preserve your health, Richard." "True Deb, quite true; but I couldn't help it, and the gout's getting better now, the pain's nearly gone. Whew! there's another twinge. Confound the gout, I say!" Damon was a stout, florid, jolly-looking--there is no other word so expressive--man of forty-five or thereabouts; Pythias--some apology is due for her sex in carrying out the classical metaphor, although when you know her better you will acknowledge the propriety of the allusion-- was some five years the elder, as she could look back with complacency or otherwise on her fiftieth birthday. She was tall and ungainly, and her face was so set and deficient of mobility that it looked as if it were carved out of mahogany, to which wood indeed its colour bore some resemblance. She evidently took after her male parent more than her mother, and her brother was right when he called her a "chip of the old block." Damon was genial and hearty; Pythias cold and formal, as befitted an austere virgin of her years; but both possessed the same kind heart, and you would rarely find such a good-natured pair, who were so fond of each other, and so considerate and charitable in every sense of the word, to those around them. Doctor Jolly was emphatically one of the jolliest country-practitioners in the country, and had one of the best practices, and was better liked than any other disciple of Aesculapius in the county. For miles round the farmers and well-to-do, as well as poorer people, knew his pleasant weather-beaten face and hearty voice. He "was so sociable and pleasant-like," as the country folk would say; and his well-known portly form--he rode about sixteen stone--and cheery "How de-do!" used to be eagerly welcomed when he came riding round on his thorough-bred heavy-weight hunter, with his two favourite little black and tan terriers, "Huz, and Buz his brother," scudding at its heels. He and his sister had lived together at Bigton for many years past. The doctor had succeeded his father, and he his father, as far back as lay within the memory of "the oldest inhabitant"--the practice with its connection having been kept in the family for nearly a century. Bigton is a very quiet rising little watering place, situated some five or six miles from The Poplars and Hartwood village, at the mouth of the river, wherein Tom Hartshorne was catching his perch under the eyes of Miss Lizzie. Bigton is by no means an ostentatious sort of place: it lacks self-assertion, and is content to occupy a back seat, as it were, in the assembly of "Fashionable Resorts," when, if it would but only put itself forward it might be bidden to "come up higher."