One weakness the doctor had in common with many of his countrymen--devotion to the social glass and flowing bowl, and when he had indulged over freely he was a changed man. Then his ordinary blandness forsook him, and he became pompous and choleric. He buttoned his coat tightly over his chest, carried his cane under his arm, and gave a defiant cock to his hat. Beware then how you contradicted him; beware how you defended that absurd heresy, homoeopathy; and above all, beware how you disparaged, even in the remotest degree, her Majesty of England, God bless her! as he would add, reverently lifting his hat. His loyalty and pomposity increased in proportion to the depths of his potations, but, whether in rigid obedience to a self-imposed law, or owing to the resistant power of his brain, he never appeared to exceed a certain well-defined limit; and no one had ever seen the doctor overcome, or known him to be in a worse state than that peculiar one indicated by a highly burnished nose, tetchy dignity, and exaggerated self-importance. The doctor was generally in this condition three evenings in the week, beginning at about four o'clock post-meridian, and so far from its being considered prejudicial to the exercise of his professional duties by his patients, many of them religiously believed that his sagacity was keener and skill greater at those times than at others. The doctor was an enigma to the Belton folk. While they all respected him for his good qualities, many were offended at his sarcasm, puzzled by his paradoxes, or displeased at his oracular utterances. A few even pronounced him an "infidel" and an "atheist." Opinionated George Gildersleeve objected to the doctor's opinionativeness, and rated him a "pig-headed John Bull." As to the charge of atheism, who could have believed it that had ever seen the doctor at service, as he stood reverentially burying his red face in his stiff hat on Sundays in the fifth pew from the chancel, in the middle aisle of St. Jude's? "Atheist, bosh!" said the doctor; "the old Latin proverb, _Ubi tres medici duo athei_, is simply nonsensical. Who comes so closely in contact with the mysterious ways of God, and realizes so thoroughly his own ignorance and impotence, as the physician? No--no, a corner of the veil has been uplifted to us, and we stand appalled and humble."