“Good morning, ladies,” mumbled he with a full mouth, as he made a feint of half-rising from his chair.  “Lady Emily, your servant—­Miss Douglas, I presume—­hem! allow me to pull the bell for your Ladyship,” as he sat without stirring hand or foot; then, after it was done—­“’Pon my honour, Lady Emily, this is not using me well Why did you not desire me?  And you are so nimble, I defy any man to get the start of you.”

“I know you have been upon hard service, Doctor, and therefore I humanely wished to spare you any additional fatigue,” replied Lady Emily.

“Fatigue, phoo!  I’m sure I mind fatigue as little as any man; besides it’s really nothing to speak of.  I have merely rode from my friend Admiral Yellowchops’ this morning.”

“I hope you passed a pleasant day there yesterday?”

“So, so—­very so, so,” returned the Doctor drily.

“Only so, so, and a turtle in the case!” exclaimed Lady Emily.

“Phoo!—­as to that, the turtle was neither here nor there.  I value turtle as little as any man.  You may be sure it wasn’t for that I went to see my old friend Yellowchops.  It happened, indeed, that there was a turtle, and a very well dressed one too; but where five and thirty people (one half of them ladies, who, of course, are always helped first) sit down to dinner, there’s an end of all rational happiness in my opinion.”

“But at a turtle feast you have surely something much better.  You know you may have rational happiness any day over a beef-steak.”

“I beg your pardon—­that’s not such an easy matter.  I can assure you it is a work of no small skill to dress a beef-steak handsomely; and, moreover, to eat it in perfection a man must eat it by himself.  If once you come to exchange words over it, it is useless.  I once saw the finest steak I ever clapped my eyes upon completely ruined by one silly scoundrel asking another if he liked fat.  If he liked fat!—­what a question for one rational being to ask another!  The fact is, a beef-steak is like a woman’s reputation, if once it is breathed upon it’s good for nothing!”

“One of the stories with which my nurse used to amuse my childhood,” said Mary, “was that of having seen an itinerant conjuror dress a beef-steak on his tongue.”

The Doctor suspended the morsel he was carrying to his mouth, and for the first time regarded Mary with looks of unfeigned admiration.

“’Pon my honour, and that was as clever a trick as ever I heard of!  You are a wonderful people, you Scotch—­a very wonderful people—­but, pray, was she at any pains to examine the fellow’s tongue?”

“I imagine not,” said Mary; “I suppose the love of science was not strong enough to make her run the risk of burning her fingers.”

“It’s a thousand pities,” said the Doctor, as he dropped his chin with an air of disappointment.  “I am surprised none of your Scotch scavans got hold of the fellow and squeezed the secret out of him.  It might have proved an important discovery—­a very important discovery; and your Scotch are not apt to let anything escape them—­a very searching, shrewd people as ever I knew—­and that’s the only way to arrive at knowledge.  A man must be of a stirring mind if he expects to do good.”