tood quite unconcerned.

"It was very good fun-n yesterday, boys, but it won't do to-t-to-day.
Bully's very ill, and Doctor Manley is afraid that he may--d-die, and it
would be beastly bad form-m to be having larks when Bulldog
is--maybe----" And Nestie came down hurriedly from the gun and went
behind the crowd, while Speug covered his retreat in an aggressive
manner, all the more aggressive that he did not seem himself to be quite
indifferent.

Manley said it. Then every boy knew it must be going hard with Bulldog;
for there was not in broad Scotland a cleverer, pluckier, cheerier soul
in his great profession than John Manley, M.D., of Edinburgh, with half
a dozen honours of Scotland, England, and France. He had an insight into
cases that was almost supernatural, he gave prescriptions which nobody
but his own chemist could make up, he had expedients of treatment that
never occurred to any other man, and then he had a way with him that
used to bring people up from the gates of death and fill despairing
relatives with hope. His arrival in the sick room, a little man, with
brusque, sharp, straightforward manner, seemed in itself to change the
whole face of things and beat back the tides of disease. He would not
hear that any disease was serious, but he treated it as if it were; he
would not allow a gloomy face in a sick room, and his language to women
who began to whimper, when he got them outside the room, was such as tom
cats would be ashamed of; and he regarded the idea of any person below
eighty dying on his hands as a piece of incredible impertinence. All
over Perthshire country doctors in their hours of anxiety and perplexity
sent for Manley; and when two men like William McClure and John Manley
took a job in hand together, Death might as well leave and go to
another case, for he would not have a look in with those champions in
the doorway. English sportsmen in lonely shooting-boxes sent for the
Muirtown crack in hours of sudden distress, and then would go up to
London and swear in the clubs that there was a man down there in a
country town of Scotland who was cleverer than all the West End swell
doctors put together. He would not allow big names of diseases to be
used in his hearing, believing that the shadow killed more people than
the reality, and fighting with all his might against the melancholy
delight that Scots people have in serious sickness and other dreary
dispensations. When Manley returned one autumn f