and a great deal more, to tell a grey-haired
gentleman, in a cool, courteous, and determined
way, that he has found him out to be a rascal. I
had that to do.

Doctor Hawley did not appear surprised at
the intelligence. With a wonderful ingenuity,
indeed, he assumed the tone of an insulted,
injured man; and turned upon me the character
of a designing villain. But there was in his
hypocrisy an under-current of brutal defiance,
and a bitterness of insult obviously designed to
drive me to extremes.

My temperate offer was that he should at
once consent to a legal cancelling of the bond of
partnership, setting me free, and keeping all the
money I had paid. I would then retire to the
house I was occupying, and do what I could
alone in Beetleborough; but I would not leave
the place. I had paid my footing, and would
make my footing sure: on that I was resolved.
To any settlement of our affairs so plain as this,
Doctor Hezekiah would, on no account,
consent. He held me to the bond, meaning thereby
to force me into flight, and leave him free to
effect another sale of the desirable position I
had paid for.

"Very well, sir," said poor flute-playing Tom
Pawley, "since we are to be partners, be it
so. I will be your partner, but not your
associate; will make a practice here in spite
of you, and let you spend upon your lawyers
half of what I earn. There is an end to
seven years. Do what you may, I WILL pull
through."

The doctor said in his heart that I should
not, and spent all his ingenuity in making an
untenable position look as hopeless and as
wretched as might be. Still I was shunned
and (what was hardly better) pitied by the
Beetleborough people. But when they saw
that, although Doctor Hawley's partner, I knew
my position and was not his friend, and that,
pale and meek and white-haired as I was, I
ventured upon actual defiance of the parish ogre,
pity disappeared. A curious visitor or two
dropped in upon this little study into which I
had crammed my books, and in which on many
a lonely evening, after the day's calm endurance,
I had sobbed over poor Deborah's desponding
letters. Then my one friend the dog, in
tribulation over my distress, would seize my arm
between his paws, and leap up, with a distressed
whine, to lick his master's hidden face. No
matter. I had set every nerve for the contest.
In the eyes of Beetleborough, I was light of
heart and light of step; to some I may have
seemed but as a cork floating about upon the
surface of the storm.

Of course I could have fought and won my
battle at the cost of certain life-long ruin in the
Court of Chancery, to which all quarrels of
partners are referred. Poverty and common
sense preserved me from that folly. I was content
to possess evidence that made me reasonably
safe against attack by law on the next
ground I ventured upon taking.

A gross act of my partner's involved me,
innocently, as a witness in an assize case, of
which all the details were disgraceful. It was
evident that the position I had chosen really
was untenable. Therefore at last I said to my
partner, "Do as you please. I have clear
evidence of the fraud by which I was induced to
sign the deed of partnership between us. From
this day forward I shall act as if it were waste
paper. I shall practise by myself and for
myself. Hinder me if you can."

When my friends heard what young Pawley
was about, horror and indignation seized them.
They all gave him up as mad. A gaol would be
the end of him. If I would leave Beetleborough
and try fortune somewhere else (having no
penny of means to do so), they could then
believe in my discretion, but to face ruin, to defy
the law, where were my senses?

And yet at Beetleborough tea-tables young
Mr. Pawley was declared to be a braver fellow
than he looked. In the village street he had
many a warm gripe of the hand from men who
had been bitten—as there were few who had not
been bitten—by the ogre, and who liked him well
for what they called his pluck. During his five-
and-twenty years among these people Doctor
Hawley had contrived to make, abuse, and
forfeit, every one's friendship. His manners were
insinuating—he knew how, being in truth very
ignorant—to suggest high opinions of his own
professional ability. He might, therefore, when
I met with him, have been the wealthiest and
most popular medical man in the county, instead
of the restless, penniless adventurer that he had
become through a diseased love of stray gains
made in the lump by a dishonest cleverness.
For his litigious character, even more than for
the wrong he had done often to the weak and
helpless, he was everywhere as much feared as
he was hated.

Nevertheless, there was a wretched little tribe
of village vagabonds attached to him, by whose
agency he could distribute scandals through a
very ignorant and scandal-loving population.
For one week it was village talk that I had been
seen drunk; next week there was a deceased
patient of mine whom I had poisoned with an
overdose of laudanum. Anonymous letters were
sent to me, or addressed to those who showed
themselves to have some care about me.
Vagrants were sent to sing insolent ballads,
tallying with the last libel—that might wound the
fame, perhaps, of others with my own—beneath
my window. Scandal so foul as some of that
which spread can hardly be conceived by those
who have not lived where ignorance and
immorality abound. I knew the fountain of it all.
Nothing on earth except my dog saw that I
ever suffered. Whatever scandal came direct
to me I put aside with the invariable answer to
the questioner about it, "You know whence the
report came, it is for you to believe it or not,
as you please." I meant to pull through, and
knew that I could not work like a horse—for as
I had been obliged to sell my horse, and could
not buy another, I did really perform a horse's
rounds every day on foot—I could not do both