Then they began to be overwhelmed with business. First, the infallible doctor was to be consulted; so poor Mrs. Hazlehurst was dragged out of bed some three hours sooner than usual, breakfasted in a nervous tremor, which rendered the ceremony a most unreal mockery, was transported from her carriage to a stately dining-room, where some twenty fellow-victims were already incarcerated, whence (having waited two hours, because, in her ignorance of London rascalities, she had omitted to fee the noble creature in plush and powder who had admitted her) she was at length (his nobleness not being able longer to exclude her) ushered into the presence of the potentate of pills himself. This erudite individual was a short, stiff man, with a short, stiff appearance,--the result of the most severe application of starch and hair-brushes,--and a short, stiff manner, assumed, as are the stare and swagger of Van Amburg and other tiger-tamers, for the purpose of browbeating and mentally subduing refractory or sceptical patients. Seeing at a glance, however, that poor Mrs. Hazlehurst was already subdued, he obligingly let off a little superfluous starch, slightly disarranged his hair, smiled, to show a fine set of false teeth, put in at trade-price by a friendly dentist, and having thus brought himself somewhat nearer the limpness of average humanity, added (as he would have probably expressed it) a couple of drachms _syrupi saccarinis_ to his manner, ere he proceeded to catechise his patient as to her symptoms, and the remedies that had been applied to remove them. To each fact thus elicited, he replied by frowning portentously, screwing round his mouth, and muttering, “I knew it,” in a gloomy and mysterious manner, as though he had acquired the knowledge by some awful and supernatural course of study; and, indeed, as Mrs. Hazlehurst’s confessions involved her having had a dangerous fall from her horse at a period when he, the doctor, must have been about five years old, and that she had been laid up with a bilious fever exactly two calendar months and four days before he was born, he can scarcely be supposed to have come by his information honestly and lawfully. In fact, to a logical mind, the question resolved itself into the following hypothesis--that he must either be a true prophet, or a lying doctor.