r and the sick man; saw the doctor come
out, half an hour later, with his ruddy face a shade paler than usual;
pressed him eagerly for information, and received but one answer to all
their inquiries--"Wait till I have seen him to-morrow. Ask me nothing
to-night." They all knew the doctor's ways, and they augured ill when he
left them hurriedly with that reply.

So the two first English visitors of the year came to the Baths of
Wildbad in the season of eighteen hundred and thirty-two.

II. THE SOLID SIDE OF THE SCOTCH CHARACTER.

AT ten o'clock the next morning, Mr. Neal--waiting for the medical visit
which he had himself appointed for that hour--looked at his watch, and
discovered, to his amazement, that he was waiting in vain. It was close
on eleven when the door opened at last, and the doctor entered the room.

"I appointed ten o'clock for your visit," said Mr. Neal. "In my country,
a medical man is a punctual man."

"In my country," returned the doctor, without the least ill-humor, "a
medical man is exactly like other men--he is at the mercy of accidents.
Pray grant me your pardon, sir, for being so long after my time; I have
been detained by a very distressing case--the case of Mr. Armadale,
whose traveling-carriage you passed on the road yesterday."

Mr. Neal looked at his medical attendant with a sour surprise. There
was a latent anxiety in the doctor's eye, a latent preoccupation in the
doctor's manner, which he was at a loss to account for. For a moment
the two faces confronted each other silently, in marked national
contrast--the Scotchman's, long and lean, hard and regular; the
German's, plump and florid, soft and shapeless. One face looked as if it
had never been young; the other, as if it would never grow old.

"Might I venture to remind you," said Mr. Neal, "that the case now under
consideration is MY case, and not Mr. Armadale's?"

"Certainly," replied the doctor, still vacillating between the case
he had come to see and the case he had just left. "You appear to be
suffering from lameness; let me look at your foot."

Mr. Neal's malady, however serious it might be in his own estimation,
was of no extraordinary importance in a medical point of view. He was
suffering from a rheumatic affection of the ankle-joint. The necessary
questions were asked and answered and the necessary baths were
prescribed. In ten minutes the consultation was at an end, and the
patient was waiting in significant silen