ern suburb, there stood two pleasant houses
side by side, with their gardens sloping down to the Whit, and parted
from each other only by the high brick fruit-wall, through which there
used to be a door of communication; for the two occupiers were fast
friends. In one of these two houses, sixteen years ago, lived our
friend Mark Armsworth, banker, solicitor, land-agent, churchwarden,
guardian of the poor, justice of the peace,--in a word, viceroy of
Whitbury town, and far more potent therein than her gracious majesty
Queen Victoria. In the other, lived Edward Thurnall, esquire, doctor
of medicine, and consulting physician of all the country round. These
two men were as brothers; and had been as brothers for now twenty
years, though no two men could be more different, save in the two
common virtues which bound them to each other; and that was, that they
both were honest and kind-hearted men. What Mark's character was, and
is, I have already shown, and enough of it, I hope, to make my readers
like the good old banker: as for Doctor Thurnall, a purer or gentler
soul never entered a sick-room, with patient wisdom in his brain, and
patient tenderness in his heart. Beloved and trusted by rich and poor,
he had made to himself a practice large enough to enable him to settle
two sons well in his own profession; the third and youngest was still
in Whitbury. He was something of a geologist, too, and a botanist, and
an antiquarian; and Mark Armsworth, who knew, and knows still, nothing
of science, looked up to the Doctor as an inspired sage, quoted him,
defended his opinion, right or wrong, and thrust him forward at public
meetings, and in all places and seasons, much to the modest Doctor's
discomfiture.

The good Doctor was sitting in his study on the morning on which my
tale begins; having just finished his breakfast, and settled to his
microscope in the bay-window opening on the lawn.

A beautiful October morning it was; one of those in which Dame Nature,
healthily tired with the revelry of summer, is composing herself, with
a quiet satisfied smile, for her winter's sleep. Sheets of dappled
cloud were sliding slowly from the west; long bars of hazy blue hung
over the southern chalk downs which gleamed pearly grey beneath the
low south-eastern sun. In the vale below, soft white flakes of mist
still hung over the water meadows, and barred the dark trunks of the
huge elms and poplars, whose fast-yellowing leaves came showering dow