condescended to rejoice; this man, with a man's heart, a man's courage,
and a man's humanity! Other doctors round the county had ditch-water
in their veins; he could boast of a pure ichor, to which that of the
great Omnium family was but a muddy puddle. It was thus that he loved
to excel his brother practitioners, he who might have indulged in the
pride of excelling them both in talent and in energy! We speak now of
his early days; but even in his maturer life, the man, though mellowed,
was the same.

This was the man who now promised to take to his bosom as his own child
a poor bastard whose father was already dead, and whose mother's family
was such as the Scatcherds! It was necessary that the child's history
should be known to none. Except to the mother's brother it was an
object of interest to no one. The mother had for some short time been
talked of; but now that the nine-days' wonder was a wonder no longer.
She went off to her far-away home; her husband's generosity was duly
chronicled in the papers, and the babe was left untalked of and
unknown.

It was easy to explain to Scatcherd that the child had not lived. There
was a parting interview between the brother and sister in the jail,
during which with real tears and unaffected sorrow, the mother thus
accounted for the offspring of her shame. Then she started, fortunate
in her coming fortunes; and the doctor took with him his charge to the
new country in which they were both to live. There he found for her a
fitting home till she should be old enough to sit at his table and live
in his bachelor house; and no one but old Mr Gresham knew who she was,
or whence she had come.

Then Roger Scatcherd, having completed his six months' confinement,