se the population is made up of small
farmers and shepherds, very good fellows, most of them, but not at all
typical of home-county residents, and having more than a little in
common with the dalesmen of the north country. Their nearest resident
medical practitioner, before Dr. Vaughan came, was eight miles away, in
Lewes.

Dr. Vaughan used to say that his only son, Dick, should relieve him by
forming a practice in the district. But that was before Dick was sent
down from Oxford for ducking his tutor in the basin of a fountain and
then trying to revive that unfortunate gentleman by plastering his head
and face in chocolate meringues. It was prior also to Dick's unfortunate
expulsion from Guy's as the result of a stand-up fight with a
house-surgeon, and to his final withdrawal from the study of medicine as
a profession he was adjudged unworthy to adorn. The judgment was
emphatically indorsed by the young man himself, and so could not be
called over-severe.

When it became apparent that Dick was never to be a G.P., Dr. Vaughan
obtained the services of Edward Hatherley, a young doctor in search of a
practice, and specially altered and enlarged for his occupancy one of
the Upcroft cottages. This enabled Dr. Vaughan to decline the work of a
general practitioner without hurt to his naturally sensitive conscience.
But there still were people in the district whom he visited upon
occasion as a doctor, and his friends at Nuthill were among the favored
few. Such visits, however, did not in any way affect his income, which,
as the result of an unexpected legacy some twelve or fourteen years
before this time, was a substantial one, even apart from professional
earnings or the rents of Upcroft.

Riding, shooting, fishing, coursing, breaking in young horses and dogs,
and playing polo when opportunity offered--these, with occasional rather
wild doings in London and Brighton, made up the sum of Dick Vaughan's
contribution to the world's work so far, since the period of what he
euphemistically called his retirement from the practice of pill-making.
And it must be confessed that, until some time after the establishment
of the Nuthill household in that locality, Dick Vaughan had shown no
symptom of dissatisfaction with his lot, or of desire to tackle any more
serious sort of occupation.

What was generally regarded as Dick's idleness, and, by the more rigid
moralists, as his worthlessness, was a source of some anxiety and much
disappo