It is quite astonishing how we flew about the streets and squares, _acting great practice_; those who knew us by sight must have thought we had a great deal to do, but we practised nothing but locomotion. Some medical men thin the population, (so says Slander,) my master thinned nothing but his horses. They were the only _good jobs_ that came in his way, and certainly he made the most of them. He was obliged to _feed_ them, but he was very rarely _feed_ himself. It so happened that nobody consulted us, and the unavoidable consumption of the family infected my master's pocket, and his little resources were in a rapid decline. Still he kept a good heart; indeed, in one respect, he resembled a worm displayed in a bottle in a quack's shop window--he was never out of spirits! He was deeply in debt, and his name was on every body's books, always excepting the memorandum-books of those who wanted physicians. Still I was daily turned out, and though nobody called him in, he was to be seen, sitting very forward, apparently looking over notes supposed to have been taken after numerous critical cases and eventful consultations. Our own case was hopeless, our progress was arrested, an execution was in the house, servants met with their deserts and were turned off, goods were seized, my master was knocked up, and I was knocked down for one hundred and twenty pounds. Again my beauties blushed for a while unseen; but I was new painted, and, like some other painted personages, looked, at a distance, almost as good as new. Fortunately for me, an elderly country curate, just at this period, was presented with a living, and the new incumbent thought it incumbent upon him to present his fat lady and his thin daughter with a leathern convenience. My life was now a rural one, and for ten long years nothing worth recording happened to me. Slowly and surely did I creep along green lanes, carried the respectable trio to snug, early, neighbourly dinners, and was always under lock and key before twelve o'clock. It must be owned I began to have rather an old-fashioned look; my body was ridiculously small, and the rector's thin daughter, the bodkin, or rather packing-needle of the party, sat more forward, and on a smaller space than bodkins do now-a-days. I was perched up three feet higher than more modern vehicles, and my two lamps began to look like little dark lanterns. But my obsoleteness rendered me only more suited to the service in which I was enlisted. Honest Roger, the red-haired coachman, would have looked like a clown in a pantomime, in front of a fashionable equipage; and Simon the footboy, who slouched at my back, would have been mistaken for an idle urchin surreptitiously enjoying a ride. But on my unsophisticated dickey and footboard no one could doubt but that Roger and Simon were in their proper places. The rector died; of course he had nothing more to do with the _living_, it passed into