r. Turnbull they were suppressed as completely as if he had
been Napoleon and they had been privates. He was kind to them, it is
true, but at times very severe, and they could neither reply to him nor
leave him. He did not affect the dress nor the manners of the doctors
who preceded him. He wore a simple, black necktie, a shirt with no
frill, and a black frock-coat. The poor worshipped him, as well they
might, for his generosity to them was unexampled, and he took as much
pains with them and was as kind to them as if they were the first people
in Eastthorpe. He was perhaps even gentler with the poor than with the
rich. He was very apt to be contemptuous, and to snarl when called to a
rich man suffering from some trifling disorder who thought that his
wealth justified a second opinion, but he watched the whole night through
with the tenderness of a woman by the bedside of poor Phoebe Crowhurst
when she had congestion of the lungs before she lived with Mrs. Furze. He
saved that girl and would not take a sixpence, and when the mother,
overcome with gratitude, actually fell on her knees before him and clung
to him and sobbed and could not speak, he lifted her up with a "Nonsense,
my good woman!" and quickly departed. He was a materialist, and
described himself as one: he disbelieved in what he called the
soap-bubble theory, that somewhere in us there is something like a
bubble, which controls everything, and is everything, and escapes
invisible and gaseous to some other place after death. Consequently he
never went to church. He was not openly combative, but Eastthorpe knew
his heresies, and was taught to shudder at them. His professionally
religious neighbours of course put him in hell in the future, but the
common people did not go so far as that, although they could not believe
him saved. They somehow confounded his denial of immortality with his
own mortality, and imagined he would be at an end when he was put into
the grave. As time wore on the attitude, even of the clergy, towards the
doctor was gradually changed. They hastened to recognise him on week-
days as he walked in his rapid, stately manner through the streets,
although if they saw him on Sundays they considered it more becoming to
avoid him. He was, as we have seen, a materialist, but yet he was the
most spiritual person in the whole district. He took the keenest
interest in science; he was generous, and a believer in a spiritualism
infinitely