Sir Willoughby was the fortune-favoured in the little doctor’s mind; that high-stepping gentleman having wealth, and public consideration, and the most ravishing young lady in the world for a bride.  Still, though he reckoned all these advantages enjoyed by Sir Willoughby at their full value, he could imagine the ultimate balance of good fortune to be in favour of Vernon.  But to do so, he had to reduce the whole calculation to the extreme abstract, and feed his lean friend, as it were, on dew and roots; and the happy effect for Vernon lay in a distant future, on the borders of old age, where he was to be blessed with his lady’s regretful preference, and rejoice in the fruits of good constitutional habits.  The reviewing mind was Irish.  Sir Willoughby was a character of man profoundly opposed to Dr. Corney’s nature; the latter’s instincts bristled with antagonism—­not to his race, for Vernon was of the same race, partly of the same blood, and Corney loved him:  the type of person was the annoyance.  And the circumstance of its prevailing successfulness in the country where he was placed, while it held him silent as if under a law, heaped stores of insurgency in the Celtic bosom.  Corney contemplating Sir Willoughby, and a trotting kern governed by Strongbow, have a point of likeness between them; with the point of difference, that Corney was enlightened to know of a friend better adapted for eminent station, and especially better adapted to please a lovely lady—­could these high-bred Englishwomen but be taught to conceive another idea of manliness than the formal carved-in-wood idol of their national worship!

Dr Corney breakfasted very early, without seeing Vernon.  He was off to a patient while the first lark of the morning carolled above, and the business of the day, not yet fallen upon men in the shape of cloud, was happily intermixed with nature’s hues and pipings.  Turning off the high-road tip a green lane, an hour later, he beheld a youngster prying into a hedge head and arms, by the peculiar strenuous twist of whose hinder parts, indicative of a frame plunged on the pursuit in hand, he clearly distinguished young Crossjay.  Out came eggs.  The doctor pulled up.

“What bird?” he bellowed.

“Yellowhammer,” Crossjay yelled back.

“Now, sir, you’ll drop a couple of those eggs in the nest.”

“Don’t order me,” Crossjay was retorting.  “Oh, it’s you, Doctor Corney.  Good morning.  I said that, because I always do drop a couple back.  I promised Mr. Whitford I would, and Miss Middleton too.”

“Had breakfast?”

“Not yet.”

“Not hungry?”

“I should be if I thought about it.”

“Jump up.”

“I think I’d rather not, Doctor Corney.”

“And you’ll just do what Doctor Corney tells you; and set your mind on rashers of curly fat bacon and sweetly smoking coffee, toast, hot cakes, marmalade, and damson-jam.  Wide go the fellow’s nostrils, and there’s water at the dimples of his mouth!  Up, my man.”