ad hung
about the room, among awful implements of the healing art, strings of
red pepper and corpulent cucumbers, carefully preserved for seed.

Peter de Groodt, and his protege, were received with great gravity and
stateliness by the doctor, who was a very wise, dignified little man,
and never smiled. He surveyed Dolph from head to foot, above, and
under, and through his spectacles; and the poor lad's heart quailed as
these great glasses glared on him like two full moons. The doctor
heard all that Peter de Groodt had to say in favour of the youthful
candidate; and then, wetting his thumb with the end of his tongue, he
began deliberately to turn over page after page of the great black
volume before him. At length, after many hums and haws, and strokings
of the chin, and all that hesitation and deliberation with which a
wise man proceeds to do what he intended to do from the very first,
the doctor agreed to take the lad as a disciple; to give him bed,
board, and clothing, and to instruct him in the healing art; in return
for which, he was to have his services until his twenty-first year.

Behold, then, our hero, all at once transformed from an unlucky
urchin, running wild about the streets, to a student of medicine,
diligently pounding a pestle, under the auspices of the learned Doctor
Karl Lodovick Knipperhausen. It was a happy transition for his fond
old mother. She was delighted with the idea of her boy's being brought
up worthy of his ancestors; and anticipated the day when he would be
able to hold up his head with the lawyer, that lived in the large
house opposite; or, peradventure, with the Dominie himself.

Doctor Knipperhausen was a native of the Palatinate of Germany; from
whence, in company with many of his countrymen, he had taken refuge
in England, on account of religious persecution. He was one of nearly
three thousand Palatines, who came over from England in 1710, under
the protection of Governor Hunter. Where the doctor had studied, how
he had acquired his medical knowledge, and where he had received his
diploma, it is hard at present to say, for nobody knew at the time;
yet it is certain that his profound skill and abstruse knowledge were
the talk and wonder of the common people, far and near.

His practice was totally different from that of any other physician;
consisting in mysterious compounds, known only to himself, in the
preparing and administering of which, it was said, he always consulted
the