ich he seldom lifted his eyes.

His room pleased him better. Polly had stretched a bright green drugget
on the floor; the table had a green cloth on it; the picture showed up
well against the whitewashed wall. Behind him was a large deal
cupboard, which held instruments and drugs. The bookshelves with their
precious burden were within reach of his hand; on the top shelf he had
stacked the boxes containing his botanical and other specimens.

The first week or so there was naturally little doing: a sprained wrist
to bandage, a tooth to draw, a case of fly-blight. To keep himself from
growing fidgety, he overhauled his minerals and butterflies, and
renewed faded labels. This done, he went on to jot down some ideas he
had, with regard to the presence of auriferous veins in quartz. It was
now generally agreed that quartz was the matrix; but on the question of
how the gold had found its way into the rock, opinions were sharply
divided. The theory of igneous injection was advanced by some; others
inclined to that of sublimation. Mahony leaned to a combination of the
two processes, and spent several days getting his thoughts in order;
while Polly, bursting with pride, went about on tiptoe audibly hushing
the children: their uncle was writing for the newspapers.

Still no patients worth the name made their appearance. To fend off the
black worry that might get the better of him did he sit idle, he next
drew his Bible to him, and set about doing methodically what he had so
far undertaken merely by fits and starts--deciding for himself to what
degree the Scriptures were inspired. Polly was neither proud nor happy
while this went on, and let the children romp unchecked. At present it
was not so much the welfare of her husband's soul she feared for: God
must surely know by this time what a good man Richard was; he had not
his equal, she thought, for honesty and uprightness; he was kind to the
poor and the sick, and hadn't missed a single Sunday at church, since
their marriage. But all that would not help, if once he got the
reputation of being an infidel. Then, nobody would want him as a doctor
at all.

Casually begun, Mahony's studies soon absorbed him to the exclusion of
everything else.

Brought up in the cast-iron mould of Irish Protestantism, to which,
being of a sober and devout turn of mind, he had readily submitted, he
had been tossed, as a youthful student, into the freebooting Edinburgh
of the forties. Edinburgh was a