early life a large income.
Perhaps in no career has a man to work harder for what he earns, or
to do more work without earning anything. It has sometimes seemed
to me as though the young doctors and the old doctors had agreed to
divide between them the different results of their profession,--the
young doctors doing all the work and the old doctors taking all the
money. If this be so it may account for that appearance of premature
gravity which is borne by so many of the medical profession. Under
such an arrangement a man may be excused for a desire to put away
childish things very early in life.

Dr Crofts had now been practising in Guestwick nearly seven years,
having settled himself in that town when he was twenty-three years
old, and being at this period about thirty. During those seven
years his skill and industry had been so fully admitted that he had
succeeded in obtaining the medical care of all the paupers in the
union, for which work he was paid at the rate of one hundred pounds
a year. He was also assistant-surgeon at a small hospital which was
maintained in that town, and held two or three other similar public
positions, all of which attested his respectability and general
proficiency. They, moreover, thoroughly saved him from any of the
dangers of idleness; but, unfortunately, they did not enable him
to regard himself as a successful professional man. Whereas old Dr
Gruffen, of whom but few people spoke well, had made a fortune in
Guestwick, and even still drew from the ailments of the town a
considerable and hardly yet decreasing income. Now this was hard
upon Dr Crofts--unless there was existing some such well-understood
arrangement as that above named.

He had been known to the family of the Dales long previous to his
settlement at Guestwick, and had been very intimate with them from
that time to the present day. Of all the men, young or old, whom Mrs
Dale counted among her intimate friends, he was the one whom she most
trusted and admired. And he was a man to be trusted by those who knew
him well. He was not bright and always ready, as was Crosbie, nor had
he all the practical worldly good sense of Bernard Dale. In mental
power I doubt whether he was superior to John Eames;--to John Eames,
such as he might become when the period of his hobbledehoyhood should
have altogether passed away. But Crofts, compared with the other
three, as they all were at present, was a man more to be trusted than
any of the