against whom I have warned you. Go and put
yourself into that rascal's power."

"Miss Tims, sir, is worth a thousand of you
all!"

"Ah, here you go again! Look here, young
man. I, too, hold by my word. I have promised
to lend you the six hundred pounds you
want, above your own two hundred and fifty.
Here is a cheque for that, and fifty pounds
beyond it, that you may not start in the world
altogether penniless. I have advanced you, for
your education, two hundred and thirty-seven
pounds odd shillings. Let that stand as two
hundred. You will now, therefore, owe me
eight hundred and fifty pounds, upon which,
since you are in business, I shall expect interest
at five per cent., payable half-yearly. Never
apply to me again, for either money or advice.
You choose to follow your own course. I leave
you to it." And from that determination till
his death he never swerved.

To a raw youth the first load of responsibility
is rather welcome than unwelcome. It gives a
sense of dignity by the demand it makes upon
his power. The cares of manhood are as
welcome to bold two-and-twenty as the coats of
manhood to bold seventeen. My first act of
prudence was to ensure the safe possession of
my partnership by at once paying the rest of
the purchase-money. While remaining in my
hands, bank-notes might under some pressure
change to gold, and gold to silver. To some
fifteen pounds of discount for immediate
payment, I observed timidly to Dr. Hawley that I
was entitled. He assured me that he had no
present want of the money, that he understood
nothing about investments, for he held nothing but
house property. If I paid him the money now,
it only would lie idle at his banker's, and so if I
knew how to make fifteen pounds of it by
keeping it until the appointed days of
payment, I had better keep it. Then, of course, I
paid all to him on the spot, without deducting
discount, and again observed, but not with
suspicion, the swift clutch into which it was
received. Up to this time, Doctor Hawley had
been my constant companion in Beetleborough;
indeed, we were inseparable. He now left me
a little to myself.

There was at Beetleborough a poor broken-
down surgeon—a Mr. Watts—upon the point
of abandoning his work and going to another
place to die. He had a wife and half a dozen
sickly children, but no practice that he was
clever enough to sell. While planning to take
off his hands his house and furniture, with
possibly some incidental scraps of practice that
might stick to the house-walls, I pitied Watts
with all my heart. But Doctor Hawley was so
active in his behalf that he had undertaken the
whole management of his affairs. Whether
Watts, weakened by illness, could be influenced
in spite of knowledge, or whether it was that
he knew Hawley's power over me and looked to
him as the best agent through whom to effect
an advantageous transfer of his little properties,
I cannot tell. Certainly Doctor Hawley was
allowed to assume the character of Watts's
sympathising friend. Deborah's father had lent
me a hundred pounds for purchase of furniture,
an act of weakness on his part, he said. He
could ill spare it, and I was to repay him in a
year. Out of this I gave Watts forty pounds
through Doctor Hawley's hands, and by the
Doctor's private counsel, for a horse which I
was forced to sell again for five pounds within
half a year. I had only my partner's
acknowledgment for that money, and discovered
some months later that but twenty pounds of it were
paid to the object of so much officious sympathy.
It was already little less than a defrauding of
the widow and the orphan, Watts was in his
grave within a twelvemonth. He anticipated
the approaching end by suicide.

Doctor Hawley went with me to Beetleborough,
and then excused, on account of his sympathy with
so much deep distress, an immediate return to
London upon business relating to poor Watt's
affairs. He hoped that he might yet find means
to secure for his family some little opportunity
of livelihood. It was not a busy time for practice,
and he had lost ground, doubtless, by so
many absences, but in a few days he would be
back for good, and then we would both put our
shoulders to the wheel. And so he vanished,
not for days, but weeks.

In the mean time, only a few paupers came to
me. I stuck close by the surgery, had leisure
to wonder at the very small quantity of drugs
dispensed, though an imposing array of jars and
bottles, and perceived the curious monotony
of the prescriptions in the day-book, which
appeared to recognise one tolerably harmless
compound as the universal medicine. My
paupers were reserved in manner: those whom
I visited appeared to be afraid of me; but all
declared that Doctor Hawley was a wonderfully
clever man.

The doctor occupied the handsomest house
in the village. It was built by himself, and stood
in large, neglected grounds. Who would not put
faith in such a house as that, and the grey head
that it roofed? The furniture was scanty, and
the dinner table was supplied more freely with
water and potatoes than with other sorts of food.
In later days, when every man's business was
forced on my knowledge, I knew from the
butcher that the meat bill of that mansion had
not averaged five shillings a week. But there
was a very gentle lady in it—Mrs. Hawley—by
whom there was given me for my Deborah a
shilling copy, not a new one either, of Bogatzky's
Golden Treasury. She was a pious, simple-
hearted, trusting woman, and alas, alas! the
faithful, penniless wife of a swindler. She had
been married for her fortune, and the big house
had been built out of it. The doctor, whose
degree was one of the pretences upon which he
lived, had spent every shilling she possessed.
He had deluded her, as he deluded hundreds of
people wiser in this world than she or I
professed to be; but her only, for eighteen years,
he kept in her delusion. His bland manner was
practised on her constantly. When he had