“At Highberrow, in my father’s cottage, there were only two books altogether: the Bible, and a tract by Miss Hannah More called ‘The Religion of the Fashionable World.’ But Dr. Marshall’s house at Axcombe was crammed with books: rubbish, most of them, I expect; but printed books; and whenever I was not working I was reading. It was the pure excitement of attaining knowledge of any kind that made me read; and of course I wasted a great deal of valuable time in ways that were unprofitable. The doctor did not help me much; he was far too busy to worry much about my education; but I know that he approved of my eagerness, and liked to see me reading. I used to sleep in the loft above the stable in those days, and I know that my candles made him rather nervous of fire. But he did help me, in his own way. He put me on to a little Latin, with the strictly practical idea of making it more easy for me to dispense the prescriptions that he wrote in the old manner without abbreviations; and he also introduced me to another book that I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of: called _Religio Medici_ by Sir Thomas Browne.” “I know it,” said Edwin. “Do you? I supposed it was merely a medical curiosity. Latin, he thought, would be useful to me in other ways. You see, like many of the old medical practitioners that spent their lives in the lanes, he was very interested in botany: not scientific botany—just the identification and botanical names of the flowers that blossomed year by year in the hedges. In the early summer he would drive home with the bottom of the dogcart tangled with flowers that he had picked while he walked the pony up some hill; and he would pitch them over to me and tell me to learn the names of them. It wasn’t very difficult; for in the surgery shelves there was a fine set of Ann Pratt with excellent illustrations. And sometimes he would come home with a small insect of some kind in a pillbox and arrange it under the microscope on the table under the dispensary window; and he’d say, ‘Wonderful . . . wonderful!’ not because he’d made any biological observations, but just because it revealed a lot of unsuspected detail. “It was a favourite trick of his to show his patients a sample of their own blood corpuscles under the microscope too. ‘There they are,’ he’d say, ‘like a pile of golden guineas, and if you had a millionth part as many guineas as you have of these in your body, you’d be the richest man in England.’ This sort of thing used to impress his patient’s tremendously. And he knew it. I suppose it gave them confidence in him; though he didn’t need any superstitious aids of this kind. The whole history of his life as a doctor should have been enough to make them trust him. Still, I suppose it was the old tradition of the medicine man who dealt in curious magic. His common sense and the craftsmanship that he had won by experience were his real guarantees.