The next time the Doctor met Colonel Stanburne at Sootythorn, he gave such a good account of Mr. Isaac Ogden, that the Colonel, who took a strong interest in little Jacob, expressed the hope that Mr. Ogden would still join the regiment; though in the time of his grief and tribulation he had resigned his commission, or, to speak more accurately--for the commission had not yet been formally made out and delivered to him--he had withdrawn his name as a candidate for one. The Colonel, in his friendly way, declared that the Doctor was not a hospitable character. "I ask you to Wenderholme every time I see you, and you come and stay sometimes, though not half often enough, but you never ask me to your house; and, by Jove! if I want to be invited at all, I must invite myself." The Doctor, who liked John Stanburne better and better the more he knew of him, still retained the very erroneous notion that a certain state and style were essential to his happiness; and, notwithstanding many broad hints that he had dropped at different times on the subject, still hung back from asking him to a house where, though comfort reigned supreme, there was not the slightest pretension to gentility. The old middle-class manner of living still lingered in many well-to-do houses in Shayton, and the Doctor faithfully adhered to it. Every thing about him was perfectly clean and decent, but he had not marched with the times; and whilst the attorneys and cotton-spinners in Sootythorn and elsewhere had the chairs of their dining-rooms covered with morocco leather, and their drawing-rooms filled with all manner of glittering fragilities, and Brussels carpets with pretty little tasteful patterns, and silver forks, and napkins, and a hundred other visible proofs of the advance of refinement, the worthy Doctor had not kept up with them at all, but lagged behind by the space of about thirty years. He had no drawing-room; the chairs of his parlor were of an ugly and awkward pattern, and their seats were covered with horsehair; the carpet was cheap and coarse, with a monstrous pattern that no artistic person would have tolerated for a single day; and though the Doctor possessed a silver punch-ladle and tea-pot, and plenty of silver spoons of every description, all the forks in the house were of steel! Indeed, the Doctor's knives and forks, which had belonged to his mother, or perhaps even to his grandmother, were quite a curiosity in their way. They had horn handles, of an odd indescribable conformation, supposed to adapt itself to the hollow of the hand, but which, from some misconception of human anatomy on the part of the too ingenious artificer, seemed always intended for the hand of somebody else. These handles were stained of such a brilliant green, that, in the slang of artists, they "killed" every green herb on the plate of him who made use of them. The forks had spring guards, to prevent the practitioner from cutting his left hand