ally generate a tyrannical habit in
him who wields it. Doctor Roach was certainly not the exception to this
rule. The Czar himself was not more autocrat in the steppes of Russia,
than was he in any house where sickness had found entrance. From that
hour he planted his throne there. All the caprices of age, all the
follies of childhood, the accustomed freedoms of home, the indulgences
which grow up by habit in a household, had to give way before a monarch
more potent than all, "the Doctor." Men bore the infliction with the
same patient endurance they summoned to sustain the malady. They felt
it to be grievous and miserable, but they looked forward to a period of
relief, and panted for the arrival of the hour, when the disease and the
doctor would take their departure together.

If the delight they experienced at such a consummation was extreme,
so to the physician it savoured of ingratitude. "I saved his life
yesterday," saith he, "and see how happy he is, to dismiss me to-day."
But who is ever grateful for the pangs of a toothache?--or what heart
can find pleasure in the memory of sententiousness, senna, and low diet?

Never were the blessings of restored health felt with a more suitable
thankfulness than by Doctor Roach's patients. To be free once more from
his creaking shoes, his little low dry cough, his harsh accents, his
harsher words, his contradictions, his sneers, and his selfishness,
shed a halo around recovery, which the friends of the patient could not
properly appreciate.

Such was the individual whose rumbling and rattling vehicle now entered
the court-yard of Carrig-na-curra, escorted by poor Terry, who had
accompanied him the entire way on foot. The distance he had come, his
more than doubts about the fee, the severity of the storm, were not the
accessories likely to amend the infirmities of his temper; while a still
greater source of irritation than all existed in the mutual feeling of
dislike between him and Sir Archibald M'Nab. An occasional meeting at a
little boarding-house in Killarney, which Sir Archy was in the habit of
visiting each summer for a few days--the only recreation he permitted
himself--had cultivated this sentiment to such a pitch, that they never
met without disagreement, or parted without an actual quarrel. The
doctor was a democrat, and a Romanist of the first water; Sir Archy was
a member of the Scottish Episcopal Church; and, whatever might have been
his early leanings in politi