What Mark's character was, and
is, I have already shown, and enough of it, I hope, to make my readers
like the good old banker: as for Doctor Thurnall, a purer or gentler
soul never entered a sick-room, with patient wisdom in his brain, and
patient tenderness in his heart. Beloved and trusted by rich and poor,
he had made to himself a practice large enough to enable him to settle
two sons well in his own profession; the third and youngest was still
in Whitbury. He was something of a geologist, too, and a botanist, and
an antiquarian; and Mark Armsworth, who knew, and knows still, nothing
of science, looked up to the Doctor as an inspired sage, quoted him,
defended his opinion, right or wrong, and thrust him forward at public
meetings, and in all places and seasons, much to the modest Doctor's
discomfiture.
The good Doctor was sitting in his study on the morning on which my
tale begins; having just finished his breakfast, and settled to his
microscope in the bay-window opening on the lawn.
A beautiful October morning it was; one of those in which Dame Nature,
healthily tired with the revelry of summer, is composing herself, with
a quiet satisfied smile, for her winter's sleep. Sheets of dappled
cloud were sliding slowly from the west; long bars of hazy blue hung
over the southern chalk downs which gleamed pearly grey beneath the
low south-eastern sun. In the vale below, soft white flakes of mist
still hung over the water meadows, and barred the dark trunks of the
huge elms and poplars, whose fast-yellowing leaves came showering down
at the very rustle of the western breeze, spotting the grass below.
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