and
insinuating tone, as he mixed his man a draught.

"You doctors? You're a cock of a different hackle from old Heale,
then."

"I trust so," said Tom.

"By George, I feel better already. I say, you're a trump; I suppose
you're Heale's new partner, the man who was washed ashore!"

Tom nodded assent;

"I say--How do you sell that honey-dew?"

"I don't sell it; I'll give you as much as you like, only you shan't
smoke it till after dinner."

"Shan't?" said Trebooze, testy and proud.

"Not with my leave, or you'll be complaining two hours hence that I am
a humbug, and have done you no good. Get on your horse, and have four
hours' gallop on the downs, and you'll feel like a buffalo bull by two
o'clock."

Trebooze looked at him with a stupid curiosity and a little awe. He
saw that Tom's cool self-possession was not meant for impudence; and
something in his tone and manner told him that the boast of being "a
man of the world" was not untrue. And of all kinds of men, a man of
the world was the man of whom Trebooze stood most in awe. A small
squireen, cursed with six or seven hundreds a year of his own, never
sent to school, college, or into the army, he had grown up in a narrow
circle of squireens like himself, without an object save that of
gratifying his animal passions; and had about six years before, being
then just of age, settled in life by marrying his housemaid--the only
wise thing, perhaps, he ever did. For she, a clever and determined
woman, kept him, though not from drunkenness and debt, at least from
delirium tremens and ruin, and was, in her rough, vulgar way, his
guardian angel--such a one at least, as he was worthy of. More than
once has one seen the same seeming folly turn out in practice as wise
a step as could well have been taken; and the coarse nature of the
man, which would have crushed and ill-used a delicate and high-minded
wife, subdued to something like decency by a help literally meet for
it.

There was a pause. Trebooze fancied, and wisely, that the Doctor was a
cleverer man than he, and of course would want to show it. So, after
the fashion of a country squireen, he felt a longing to "set him
down." "He's been a traveller, they say," thought he in that
pugnacious, sceptical spirit which is bred, not, as twaddlers fancy,
by too extended knowledge, but by the sense of ignorance, and a narrow
sphere of thought, which makes a man angry and envious of any one who
has seen more than he.