"Good-morning. Did you get your lodgings all right?" said the new-comer, scanning Geoffrey's face as if in search of the seeds of disease, and looking disappointed. "Yes, thanks." "Well, don't fall in love with Madge Mullion, or old Mr Paul will be setting me to work to poison you." "Confound it all!" cried Geoffrey, facing round as he stopped short. "Do you people here think of nothing else but falling in love?" "Well, I don't know," said the doctor, dreamily, as he pushed his soft hat on one side, and gave his head a rub. "Fortunately for me they do think a great deal of that sort of thing." "So it seems. I've heard enough of it during the past four-and-twenty hours to make it seem as if your people thought young women were gunpowder, and I was a match." "Ah, yes!" said the doctor, sadly. "It's the old story, you know-- marrying and giving in marriage. What should we do for our population without?" "Population don't seem to keep you very busy, doctor." "Pretty well," he said quietly: "pretty well; people have very large families about here, but they emigrate." "Do they?" said Geoffrey. "Yes, the mining trade has been bad. But people have very large families about here," said the doctor, with a sigh. "I've got ten of them." "Fruitful vine and olive branches round the table, eh?" said Geoffrey. "Ye-es," said the doctor, making an imaginary cast with his fly-rod over the heather; "but when the vine is too fruitful it rather shades the table, you know." "So I should suppose," replied Geoffrey, with a slight grimace. "Have you good fishing here?" "No--oh no! Nothing but small trout in the little streams, and they are getting poisoned by the mining refuse." "I'll try them some day," said Geoffrey. "I wouldn't if I were you," said the doctor, nervously. "It isn't worth your while, and it's very hard work to get a dish now-a-days," and he glanced with anxious eyes at his companion. For, on non-busy mornings, Mr James Rumsey, MRCSE--the "doctor" being a local degree--found it useful to take his rod and capture a dish of trout for the home dinner, if he did not go out in the bay, in a borrowed boat, in search of something more substantial. "Ah well, we'll see," said Geoffrey. "Yonder's Horton Friendship, is it not?" "Yes, that's it," said the doctor, who seemed relieved. "That's the manager's office close by. They've got a manager there." "Oh! have they?" said Geoffrey, who was amused by the doctor's subdued, weary way. "All right; I'm going to see it, though. Good-morning." "Good-morning," said the doctor, and making dreamy casts with his rod, he went on over the heather. "Looks dull, and as if he had lived too much in the shade--of the vine and olive branches," said Geoffrey, as he strode along. "Well, ten branches would keep off a good deal of the sun of a man's life. What a row those stamps make!"