of his head, which was worth quite a hundred a year
to him. He was particularly happy in his management of ladies. He had
caught the tone of bland sternness and decisive suavity which dominates
without offending. Ladies, however, were not equally happy in their
management of him. Professionally, he was always at their service.
Socially, he was a drop of quicksilver. In vain the country mammas
spread out their simple lures in front of him. Dances and picnics were
not to his taste, and he preferred during his scanty leisure to shut
himself up in his study, and to bury himself in Virchow's Archives and
the professional journals.

Study was a passion with him, and he would have none of the rust which
often gathers round a country practitioner. It was his ambition to
keep his knowledge as fresh and bright as at the moment when he had
stepped out of the examination hall. He prided himself on being able
at a moment's notice to rattle off the seven ramifications of some
obscure artery, or to give the exact percentage of any physiological
compound. After a long day's work he would sit up half the night
performing iridectomies and extractions upon the sheep's eyes sent in
by the village butcher, to the horror of his housekeeper, who had to
remove the debris next morning. His love for his work was the one
fanaticism which found a place in his dry, precise nature.

It was the more to his credit that he should keep up to date in his
knowledge, since he had no competition to force him to exertion. In
the seven years during which he had practised in Hoyland three rivals
had pitted themselves against him, two in the village itself and one in
the neighbouring hamlet of Lower Hoyland. Of these one had sickened
and wasted, being, as it was said, himself the only patient whom he had
treated during his eighteen months of ruralising. A second had bought
a fourth share of a Basingstoke practice, and had departed honourably,
while a third had vanished one September night, leaving a gutted house
and an unpaid drug bill behind him. Since then the district had become
a monopoly, and no one had dared to measure himself against the
established fame of the Hoyland doctor.

It was, then, with a feeling of some surprise and considerable
curiosity that on driving through Lower Hoyland one morning he
perceived that the new house at the end of the village was occupied,
and that a virgin brass plate glistened upon the swinging gate which