“Good God! I would shoot him if he did; or strike him dead into this water”. In the hot haste of youth he had spoken aloud, with his fist gathered up, and his eyes flashing fire. Rufus Hutton saw and heard him, and thought of it many times after that day. “Oh, you are thinking of Caldo, because he snapped at me. There are no signs of hydrophobia. You must not think of shooting him”. “I was not thinking of Caldo. I hope I did not mean it. God knows, I am very wicked”. “So we are all, my boy. I should like to see a fellow that wasnʼt. Iʼd pay fifty pounds for his body, and dissect him into an angel”. Cradock Nowell smiled a little at such a reward for excellence, and then renewed his gaze of dreary bewilderment at the water. “Now let me show you my tracings, Cradock. Three times I have pulled them out, and you wonʼt condescend to glance at them. You have made up your mind to abdicate upon my _ipse dixi_. Now look at the bend sinister, that is yours; the bend dexter is for the elder brother”. “Dr. Hutton, it may be, and is, I believe, false shame on my part; but I wish to hear nothing about it. Perhaps, if my mother were living, I might not have been so particular. But giving, as she did, her life for mine, I cannot regard it medically. The question is now for my father. I will not enter into it”. “Oh the subjectiveness of the age”! said Rufus Hutton, rising, then walking to and fro on the bank, as he held discourse with himself; “here is a youth who ought to be proud, although at the cost of his inheritance, of illustrating, in the most remarkable manner, indeed I may say of originating, my metrostigmatic theory. He carries upon the cervical column a clear impression of grapes, and they say that before the show at Romsey the gardener was very cross indeed about his choice Black Hamburgs. His brother carries the identical impress, only with the direction inverted—dexter in fact, and dexter was the mark of the elder son. This I can prove by the tracing made at the time, not with any view to future identification, but from the interest I felt, at an early stage of my experience, in a question then under controversy. If I prove this, what happens? Why, that he loses everything—the importance, the house, the lands, the title; and becomes the laughing–stock of the county as the sham Sir Cradock. What ought he to do at once, then? Why, perhaps to toss me into that hole, where I should never get out again. By Gad, I am rash to trust myself with him, and no other soul in the secret”! Here Dr. Hutton shuddered to think how little water it would take to drown him, and the river so dark and so taciturn! “At any rate, he ought to fall upon me with forceps, and probe, and scalpel, and tear my evidence to atoms. For, after all, what is it, without corroboration? But instead of that, he only says, ‘Dr. Hutton, no more of this, if you please, no more of this! The question is now for my father’. And he must know well enough to which side his