"If I were you, Mr. Slocombe, I would just run up to town one day and see Sir Percival Pylle; he is quite at the top of the profession for a case like yours, and I should feel more satisfied in treating you afterward when you have had his opinion." The young man spoke modestly enough--more so than these overtaught young gentlemen of the present day are in the habit of doing--but there was a laugh in his eye all the time, and I have since led him to confess that he did not believe he should ever get me to submit to his orders unless some medical Colossus had first laid down the law in the same direction. It was a great loss to this neighborhood when good old Dr. Manners died. We all knew and believed in him; he had vaccinated the last three generations, helped them through croup and measles, had lanced their babies' gums, and attended the funerals of at least half the parish twice over; and now that he was gone we none of us had the least idea how to be ill without him. Young Mr. Hunter had been with Dr. Manners for a short time before his death; but what are a few months' experience compared to that of the man who has known and physicked you from the day of your birth? So there was a little division of feeling about Hunter; the young folks, who could not be expected to have old heads on their shoulders, extolled his cleverness and skill; but we elders did not commit ourselves so unreservedly, and there was a tacit agreement amongst us that in case we had to call in the new doctor, it would be well not to trust him too fully as to our ailments, confiding to his ear such symptoms merely as we thought him capable of understanding, and reserving to ourselves our own opinions, while we took those he expressed _cum grano_. He was quite right, though, in saying that worry had told upon me. Why, worry enough to tell upon a large family had thought proper to concentrate itself upon me, Adolphus Slocombe, a quiet single gentleman no longer walking on what is called the sunny side of fifty. First, there was that law-suit--the one, I mean, which had been dragging on for years about Crofton's Spinney; and when the case was settled this spring in my favor, the expenses of litigation so nearly balanced the value of the property, that the modest sum of £7 10_s._ 3_d._ was all the gain resulting from the trouble and anxiety of the law-suit. The wind was very much in the east, too, this spring. I remember there was a biting frost the very day my lawyer's bill came in--a frost that cut off all the young wall-fruit which a previous mild fortnight had coaxed into setting. I am partial to wall-fruit, particularly so to what is grown in my own garden; in fact, the garden is a hobby of mine, and those long, red-brick walls, on which the sun shines soft and warm when other aspects are in chilly shadow, had been a sheet of blossoms pink and promising, and such as not one of all my neighbors could exhibit, only the day before.