The stranger, honoured by the landlady with the name and title of Squire Mordaunt, was in the yard at the moment. He hastened towards the sufferer, who as yet was scarcely sensible, and led him into the house. The surgeon of the village was sent for and appeared. This disciple of Galen, commonly known by the name of Jeremiah Bossolton, was a gentleman considerably more inclined to breadth than length. He was exactly five feet one inch in height, but thick and solid as a milestone; a wig of modern cut, carefully curled and powdered, gave somewhat of a modish and therefore unseemly grace to a solemn eye; a mouth drawn down at the corners; a nose that had something in it exceedingly consequential; eyebrows sage and shaggy; ears large and fiery; and a chin that would have done honour to a mandarin. Now Mr. Jeremiah Bossolton had a certain peculiarity of speech to which I shall find it difficult to do justice. Nature had impressed upon his mind a prodigious love of the grandiloquent; Mr. Bossolton, therefore, disdained the exact language of the vulgar, and built unto himself a lofty fabric of words in which his sense managed very frequently to lose itself. Moreover, upon beginning a sentence of peculiar dignity, Mr. Bossolton was, it must be confessed, sometimes at a loss to conclude it in a period worthy of the commencement; and this caprice of nature which had endowed him with more words than thoughts (necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention) drove him into a very ingenious method of remedying the deficiency; this was simply the plan of repeating the sense by inverting the sentence. “How long a period of time,” said Mr. Bossolton, “has elapsed since this deeply-to-be-regretted and seriously-to-be-investigated accident occurred?” “Not many minutes,” said Mordaunt; “make no further delay, I beseech you, but examine the arm; it is not broken, I trust?” “In this world, Mr. Mordaunt,” said the practitioner, bowing very low, for the person he addressed was of the most ancient lineage in the county, “in this world, Mr. Mordaunt, even at the earliest period of civilization, delay in matters of judgment has ever been considered of such vital importance, and--and such important vitality, that we find it inculcated in the proverbs of the Greeks and the sayings of the Chaldeans as a principle of the most expedient utility, and--and--the most useful expediency!” “Mr. Bossolton,” said Mordaunt, in a tone of remarkable and even artificial softness and civility, “have the kindness immediately to examine this gentleman’s bruises.” Mr. Bossolton looked up to the calm but haughty face of the speaker, and without a moment’s hesitation proceeded to handle the arm, which was already stripped for his survey.