"Intimately, _most_ intimately," replied the doctor. "You were often with him?" "We dine together almost daily when his lordship is in town," answered the doctor, with expressions of delight. "What do you talk about?" "Eating and drinking." "Eating and drinking! What else?" asked his lordship. "O, my lord, we never talk about anything but eating and drinking,--except--" "Except what, sir?" "_Except drinking and eating_, my lord." The council retired, greatly disappointed, for they had expected to worm some important secret from the doctor. At Finch Lane Tavern, where Dr. Beauford used to receive the apothecaries at half fee, he was represented as sitting over his bottles and glasses, from which he drank deeply, never offering one of his clients a drop, though they often sat opposite, at the same table, looking with anxious countenances and watering mouths upon the tempting cordials, as the doctor tossed them off. "DOORN'T GO TO 'IM," ETC. "Not many years since, in a fishing village on the eastern coast, there flourished a doctor in great repute amongst the poor, and his influence over the humble patients literally depended on the fact that he was sure, once in the twenty-four hours, to be handsomely intoxicated. "Dickens has told us how, when he bought the raven immortalized in 'Barnaby Rudge,' the vender of that sagacious bird, after enumerating his various accomplishments, said, in conclusion,-- "'But, sir, if you want him to come out strong, you must show him a man drunk.' "The simple villagers of Flintbeach had a firm faith in the strengthening effect of looking at a tipsy doctor. They usually postponed their visits to Dr. Mutchkins till evening, because they then had the benefit of the learned man in his highest intellectual condition. "'Doorn't go to 'im i' the morning; he can't doctor no ways to speak on till he's had a glass,' was the advice usually given to strangers not aware of the doctor's little peculiarities." DR. BUTLER'S BEER AND BATH. An amusing description is given of one Dr. Butler, of London, who, like the above, used to get drunk nightly. He was the inventor of a beer which bore his name, something like our Ottawa, "with a stick in it," by one Dr. Irish. We once saw a drunken fellow holding on to a lamp post, while he held out one hand, and was arguing with an imaginary policeman that he was not drunk,--only had been taking a "little of that--hic--beverage, Dr. Waterwa's Irish beer, by the advice of his physician." [Illustration: "ONLY IRISH BEER."] Dr. Butler had an old female servant named Nell Boler. At ten o'clock, nightly, she used to go to the tavern where the doctor was, by that hour, too drunk to go home alone, when, after some argument and a deal of scolding from Nell for his "beastly drunkenness," she would carry the inebriated doctor home, and put him to bed.