Niger

to the end careless in his meals, convinced there was
no cure for his complaint. Or he dosed old women
for aches like his own or loaned his comfort to cases
beyond his cure. And now and then, with someone
mangled by a plough or the wheel of a cart, he had
the business of sawing bones and patching torn
arteries in the doubt as to whether he would ever
collect c enough to pay even the bill for the splints \
Presently, what with increasing practice and
increase of family, he was forced to open a surgery
in Peebles High Street. It was little more than a
shed. The winter winds blew coldly through the
cracks as he sat and pounded medicines or wrote
off to Edinburgh for supplies through the unchancy
conveyance of the local carters. Only with the
move to the surgery in High Street does a full and
complete distaste for his life and profession seem to
have come on him—though that move was mark of
an increasing prosperity. He sat long hours by
himself in that little shed and knew himself one not
only beaten by life, but idiotically unable to accept
the defeat.
Archibald had introduced him at Fowlshiels to
Mr. Walter Scott, the poet and Sheriff, and in the
company of the latter he could find some ease in the
kingdoms of imagination and memory that Ailie
might not enter. They had minds of a singular
similarity in many ways : both in most matters
were rigid conservatives and conventionalists ; they
had the same barrenness of creative talent, the same
admiration for the second-hand and shoddy in
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