As well in that way, and better than in another he was prone to; and unfortunately, he was getting rather too much on his hands, just then, of the article he deemed so precious. For Keene, the hatchet-faced homoeopath, had relieved the doctor of a vast deal of practice, and left him with overmuch unemployed time on his hands. Dr. Wattletop explained the increasing popularity of the heterodox practitioner in this wise: "The infernal quack seduces the children with his sugar-plums, and the mothers are silly enough to yield to their preferences; once introduced in the family, of course it is pleasanter, if one needs physic, to appease the conscience with a make-believe medicine than to take a bitter though wholesome remedy. How are you to meet this folly and weakness? Between these sugar-plums, and water-drenching, and clairvoyant cures, the profession, I say, is going to the devil--yes, sir, going to the devil! Come, Dagon, let's be off, old boy;" and with his dog jogging beside him he would betake himself to a walk, which, after a circuit of a mile or so, invariably terminated not to the infernal regions, as one would naturally infer, but to what the Belton "Band of Hope" would have designated as half way to it, viz.: "The Shades." This was a little tavern at the far end of the town, kept by an Englishman, and frequented solely by "old-country" people (of whom there were many among the mill-hands), who resorted thither to indulge in Welsh rarebits and old ale. You ascended a few steps, pushed open a swing-door, and found yourself facing a little bar attached to a small quiet room with a sanded floor. There were wire screens in the windows on the street, and the walls were ornamented with fine engravings of the All England Eleven, the Cambridgeshire Hunt, and portraits of Nelson, Wellington, and Queen Victoria. The host was a "Brummagem" man, suspected, from his blunted nose, of having been a pugilist, but as he was a surly man of uncommunicative disposition, the suspicion had never been verified. There were a half-dozen tables in the room, and at a particular one in a corner Dr. Wattletop took his place, and Dagon his (beneath the table), with undeviating method, about three days in the week, unless prevented by professional duties. Mutely, then, the blunt-nosed man brought a beaker of gin and sugar, and the _Albion_, or _Illustrated London News_ to the doctor, who in silence consumed the gin and perused the paper, his interest in the latter centring in the "Gazette," whose announcement that Major Pipeclay was promoted, vice Colonel Sabretasche retired, or that the ----th Foot were ordered to Bermuda, or that some old chum had gone to his long home, recalled recollections of by-gone days, and furnished food for reflection. After the third beaker he laid aside the paper, and was now become intensely grave and imposing, sitting bolt upright with his cane between his knees, and gazing in a very uncompromising way into vacancy. The scot