ed, the
woman sees that you don't shirk it. But you make me laugh, puttin'
on airs an' pretendin' to do it for spoort--"Wimmen ha'n't got no
sense o' spoort," says you, all solemn as owls. Soon as a boy turns
fourteen he takes up the trick. "Wimmen ha'n't got no sense o'
spoort," says he, sticking his hands in his breeches pockets; an' off
he goes to hook fish, an' comes swaggerin' back to be taken, catch
an' all, by a young 'ooman that has been sayin' naught but markin'
him down all the time. Spoort? This world, doctor, is made up of
hooks an' eyes: an' you reckon--do 'ee--the best spoort goes to the
hooks? Ask the eyes and the maidens that make 'em.'

The doctor, who had risen and picked up his hat when Mrs Puckey
linked his name with the widow Tresize's, came back and re-seated
himself by the bedside. The old woman enjoyed her chat--it did her
more good than medicine, she said--and so long as she steered it
clear of himself and his private affairs he was willing enough to
indulge her. Nay, he too--being no prude--enjoyed her general
disquisitions on matrimony and the sexes. _Homo sum, etc_.,
. . . He was a great reader of Montaigne, and like Montaigne he
loved listening to folks, however humble, who (as he put it) knew
their subject. Mrs Puckey certainly knew her subject, and if in
experience she fell a little short of Chaucer's 'Wife of Bath,' she
handled it with something of that lady's freedom, and, in detail,
with a plainness of speech worthy of Panurge.

She knew very well that by further reference to Mrs Tresize she
risked cutting short the doctor's visit. Yet, woman-like, she could
not forbear from just one more word.

'She keeps it under the bed.'

'Keeps what?' asked Doctor Unonius.

The old woman chuckled again. 'Why, her money, to be sure--hundreds
an' hundreds o' pounds--in a great iron chest. I wonder she can
sleep o' nights with it, up in that g'e'rt lonely house, an' not a
man within call--Aw, doctor, dear, don't tell me you're _goin'!_'

[1] _Quaere_. Was this some faint inherited memory of 'the old
profession'?--_In nomine domini, etc._

CHAPTER II.

A year passed; a year and three months. Old Mrs Puckey was dead and
laid in churchyard, and the doctor remained a bachelor. Christmas
found him busy upon two papers written almost concurrently: the one
'A Description of a Kind of Trigla vulgarly confounded with Trigla
Blochii,' intended for Loudon's 'Magazine of Natural