To trifling ailments he was too often brusque.  Seeing that he accepted money for the cure of such, he should, we may say, have cured them without an offensive manner.  So far he is without defence.  But to real suffering no one found him brusque; no patient lying painfully on a bed of sickness ever thought him rough.

Another misfortune was, that he was a bachelor.  Ladies think, and I, for one, think that ladies are quite right in so thinking, that doctors should be married men.  All the world feels that a man when married acquires some of the attributes of the old woman—­he becomes, to a certain extent, a motherly sort of being; he acquires a conversance with women’s ways and women’s wants, and loses the wilder and offensive sparks of his virility.  It must be easier to talk to such a one about Matilda’s stomach, and the growing pains in Fanny’s legs, than to a young bachelor.  This impediment also stood much in Dr Thorne’s way during his first years at Greshamsbury.

But his wants were not at first great; and though his ambition was perhaps high, it was not of an impatient nature.  The world was his oyster; but, circumstanced as he was, he knew that it was not for him to open it with his lancet all at once.  He had bread to earn, which he must earn wearily; he had a character to make, which must come slowly; it satisfied his soul, that in addition to his immortal hopes, he had a possible future in this world to which he could look forward with clear eyes, and advance with his heart that would know no fainting.

On his first arrival at Greshamsbury he had been put by the squire into a house, which he still occupied when that squire’s grandson came of age.  There were two decent, commodious, private houses in the village—­always excepting the rectory, which stood grandly in its own grounds, and, therefore, was considered as ranking above the village residences—­of these two Dr Thorne had the smaller.  They stood exactly at the angle before described, on the outer side of it, and at right angles to each other.  They possessed good stables and ample gardens; and it may be as well to specify, that Mr Umbleby, the agent and lawyer to the estate, occupied the larger one.

Here Dr Thorne lived for eleven or twelve years, all alone; and then for ten or eleven more with his niece, Mary Thorne.  Mary was thirteen when she came to take up permanent abode as mistress of the establishment—­or, at any rate, to act as the only mistress which the establishment possessed.  This advent greatly changed the tenor of the doctor’s ways.  He had been before pure bachelor; not a room in his house had been comfortably furnished; he at first commenced in a makeshift sort of way, because he had not at his command the means of commencing otherwise; and he had gone on in the same fashion, because the exact time had never come at which it was imperative in him to set his house in order.  He had had no fixed hour for his meals, no fixed place for his books,