With all the Doctor's quaint ideas and strong prejudices, I have said that he was a thorough gentleman. He was of the kind meant for use, and not for show. Good heavens! what would your dashing British Esculapius, in his brougham or well-appointed dogcart, have said to my old friend's appearance when setting out for a long winter's day's work? I can see him now, riding in at the gate on some wild January day, bringing hope in his kindly face, and good conservative time-honoured drugs in his well-worn saddle-bags. A woollen scarf is drawn round his head, and on the top of it is crammed an ancient wide-awake. A long black cloak, fastened round his throat with a clasp, and lined with red flannel, falls over the saddle behind. His legs, good soul, are thickly encased in coils of wheat-straw, wound tightly round them from his ankles upwards. In his hand, by way of a whip, he carries a bushy switch plucked from the nearest tree, and upon one heel a rusty spur that did duty at Bull's Run.

Now do not suppose that the Doctor on such occasions was regarded as a scarecrow, or that his neighbours looked upon him as eccentric or even careless of attire; on the contrary, this was a good old Virginia costume. The Doc tor's appearance as above described was not the desperate expedient of a frontier and transitory condition-not at all. It was a survival of two hundred years of a peculiar civilisation; a civilisation that had been wont to look inside the plantation fence for almost every necessary; a patriarchal dispensation whose simplicity was to a great extent the outcome of exclusiveness; a social organisation wherein each man's place was so absolutely fixed, that

personal apparel was a matter of almost no moment, and personal display, such as engages the wellto-do of other countries in mischievous rivalry, was hardly known.

The

The general shabbiness of Virginia was not the temporary shabbiness of a pioneering generationthat condition everybody can understand-but the picturesque and almost defiant tatterdemalionism of quite an old and thoroughly self-satisfied community, unstimulated by contact with the outer world. It was a mellow, timehonoured kind of shabbiness of which Virginians are almost proud, regarding it as a sort of mute protest, though an extreme one, against those modern innovations which their souls abhorred. Doctor had been a widower since the first year of the war. In accordance with local custom, he had buried his wife in the orchard. A simple marble shaft in that homely quarter spoke of her virtues and her worth to the colts and calves that bit the sweet May grass around her tomb, and to the inquiring swine that crunched the rotting apples as they fell in autumn from the untended trees. Neither had the Doctor been blessed with sons or daughters. Who he would "ar [heir, as a verb] his place to" was a common subject of discussion among the negroes on the property. The Doctor's profession, no doubt, was his first care; but his heart was with his farms and his fox-hounds. The Doctor had practised over, or, as we used to say there, "ridden" the south side of the country for nearly forty years. He had studied medicine with the intention only of saving the doctor's bill in his father's household of eighty negroes. He had soon, however, dropped into a regular practice, and for the last five-andtwenty years at any rate, no birth or

death within a radius of ten miles would have been considered a wellconducted one without his good offices. The Doctor's income, upon the well-thumbed scroll of hieroglyphics that he called his books, was nearly three thousand dollars a-year. He collected probably about fifteen hundred. A considerable portion, too, of this fifteen hundred was received in kind payments, not conveniently convertible, such as bacon, Indian corn, hams, wheat-flour, woollen yarns, sucking-pigs, home-made brooms, eggs, butter, bricks, sweet-potato slips, sawn plank, tobacco-plants, shingles, chickens, baskets, sausagemeat, sole-leather, young fruittrees, raw hides, hoe-handles, old iron. To utilise these various commodities, it would have been necessary for the Doctor to have had a farm, even supposing he had not already been the fortunate proprietor of two. Indeed, a farm to a Southern Doctor is not only necessary as a receptacle for the agricultural curiosities that are forced upon him in lieu of pay ment, but for the actual labour of those many dusky patients who can give no other return for physic and attendance received. You could see a bevy of these Ethiopians almost any day upon the Doctor's farm, wandering aimlessly about with hoes or brier-blades, chattering and cackling and doing everything but work.

The Doctor might have been called a successful physician. He had no rivals. There were two inferior performers in the district, it is true, who were by way of following the healing art-small farmers, who were reported to have studied medicine in their youth. One of these, however, had not credit sufficient to purchase drugs, and the other was generally drunk. So it was only their near rela

tions, when not dangerously indisposed, who patronised them-or some patient of the Doctor's now and again, perhaps, who took a fancy the latter was too “aristocratic," till he got badly sick, and returned with alacrity to his allegiance. There is no doubt, I fear, but that the Doctor practised on the lines of thirty years ago. Tory to the backbone in every other department of life, it was hardly to be expected that he should have panted for light and leading in that branch of learning in which he had no rival within reach. Papers or magazines connected with the healing science I never remember to have seen inside the Patton homestead; and yet, after a great deal of experience of the good old man's professional care, I have a sort of feeling that I would as soon place my life in his hands as in the hands of Sir Omicron Pie!

What time the Doctor had to spare from physicking, I have said he devoted to farming and to foxhunting. I should like to follow him for a bit on his long professional rounds, and listen to his cheery talk in homestead and cabin; to help him fill his long pipe, which he draws out of his top-boot when the patient has settled down to sleep or quiet; to hear him once again chat about tobacco and wheat, politics and foxes. should like, too, to say something of the Doctor's farming-heaven save the mark !-on his two properties; the one "'ard" him by his father, and the other one, the quarter place near by, that " cum to him with his wife, ole Cunnel Pendleton's daughter."

I

I must only pause to remark, however, that the Doctor farmed, as he did everything else, in the good old Virginia fashion-or in what is now irreverently known as the "rip an tar [tear] princi

ple." He didn't care anything about acres or estimates; and as for farm books, his professional accounts pestered him quite enough. Of rotations, he neither knew nor wanted to know anything. His great idea was to plough and sow as much land as he could scuffle over with all the labour he could scrape together. Of manuring, clovering, or fertilising he took little account. If he "pitched" a big crop only, he was a proud and happy man. When each recurring harvest brought results more insignificant than the last, a temporary disgust with the whole business used to seize on my old friend, and he would swear that the wheat crops had been of no account since the war; that tobacco had gone to the devil, and that he'd quit fooling with a plantation for good and all. In the eyes of those who knew him, however, such tirades meant absolutely nothing. A Virginian of his description could no more have helped farming than he could have altered any other of the immutable laws of nature. A younger generation. and many indeed of the older one, have learned wisdom and prudence in the management of land since the abolition of slavery. The Doctor, however, and the few left like him, will be land-killers of the genial good old sort til they lie under the once generous sod they have so ruthlessly treated.

The Doctor's first care was of necessity his patients; but there is no doubt, I think, that his real affections were divided between his farms and his fox-hounds. That he did his duty by the former was amply testified to by the popularity he enjoyed. That he signally failed in the treatment of his lands was quite as evident. For while he healed the sores

and the wounds of his patients, the sores, the wounds, the stormrent gullies, the bare galls in his hillsides, grew worse and worse. The naize-stalks grew thinner, the tobacco lighter, the wheatyield poorer, year by year. One has heard of famous painters, who perversely fancied themselves rather as musicians of established authors, who yearned rather to be praised as artists. So the Doctor, who certainly had no local rival in his own profession, seemed to covet fame rather as the champion and exponent of a happily departing school of Southern agriculturists. In this case, the income derived from the profession just sufficed to make good the losses on the farm. So, though the Doctor, in spite of his household expenses being almost nil, could never by any chance lay his hand on a fivedollar bill, he managed to keep upon the whole pretty free from debt.

With a scattered practice, and an agricultural hobby extending over 1000 acres, including woods and old fields "turned out to recover, it may be a matter of surprise that our old friend had leisure for a third indulgence, especially one like fox-hunting, which is connected in the British mind with such a large consumption of time. Nevertheless the Doctor, like most of his compeers, was passionately fond of the chase, and in spite of the war and altered times, had kept hounds round him almost without a break since he was a boy.

It will be seen, however, that fox-hunting, as understood and followed by the Doctor, was by no means incompatible with his more serious avocations.

Now, if the fashion in which the Doctor pursued the wily fox was not orthodox from a Leicestershire point of view, it was for all that none the less, perhaps indeed so

much the more, genuine. Around New York and Philadelphia. it is true, the sport is pursued by fashionable bankers, brokers, and lawyers in a style the most approved. All the bravery and the glitter, ay, and much of the horsemanship of the British huntingfield, is there. But, like polo and coaching, it is there as a mere exotic, transplanted but yesterday, to the amazement and occasionally indignation of the Long Island rustics and the delight of the Society papers. Everything is there-hounds, huntsmen, whips, red coats, tops, splendidly mounted hard-riding ladies and gentlemen, sherry-flasks, sandwich-boxes, &c., &c., everything, in short, but the fox. So far, however, as I can learn, such an omission is of no great importance under the modern conception of hunting. That wouldn't be the Doctor's way of thinking at all, though; for I must here remark, that that worthy sportsman's love of hunting is entirely on hereditary principles and of native growth. Fox-hunting for two centuries has been the natural pastime of the Virginia gentry. They imported the chase of the fox and its customs from the mother country at a period when such things were conducted in a very different style from what they are now.

The hunting of the fox, as carried on in England early in the last century let us say, offered, I take it, a very different spectacle from that seen in the elaborate and gorgeous cavalcades and the rushing fleetfooted hounds that race to-day over the trim well-drained turf of the shires. No foxes were killed in those days in twenty-five minutes, I'll warrant. Men started their fox at daybreak, and pottered along, absorbed in the performance of their slow hounds, over the

rushy, soppy, heathy country, from wood to wood, for hours and hours. They were lucky then, no doubt, if Reynard succumbed in time to admit of their punctual appearance at that tremendous threeo'clock orgie, which the poet Thomson has so graphically laid before us.

Amid the glitter, the show, the dash, the swagger of modern foxhunting, Englishmen who are not masters of hounds or huntsmen are apt to lose sight of the original ends and aims, the craft, and the science of the sport. It seems to me that fox hunting nowadays, with the vast mass of its devotees, is simply steeplechasing over an unknown course. This is unques

tionably a manly and a fine amusement, and far be it from me to breathe a word against it. I only wish to anticipate the sneers of your sporting stockbroker if he were to catch sight of the Doctor and his hounds upon a hunting morning.

With the average Nimrod of modern days, I venture then to assert that fox-hunting is only a modified form of steeplechasing. With the Virginian, who is simply a survival of other days, it is nothing of the kind. The Doctor knew nothing of bullfinches or double ditches, of post and rails or fivebarred gates, in a sporting sense; but what he did not know about a fox was not worth knowing at all. As for his hounds, he could tell the note of each at a distance when the music of the whole pack was scarcely audible to the ordinary ear.

As far as I remember, the Doctor generally used to keep about five couple of hounds. It is needless to say he always swore they were the "best stock of foxdogs in the State." Jim Pendleton, his cousin across the hill, and