The Doctor's of Hoyland

Dr. James Ripley was always looked upon as an
exceedingly lucky dog by all of the profession who
knew him. His father had preceded him in a practice
in the village of Hoyland, in the north of Hampshire,
and all was ready for him on the very first day that
the law allowed him to put his name at the foot of a
prescription. In a few years the old gentleman
retired, and settled on the South Coast, leaving his
son in undisputed possession of the whole country
side. Save for Dr. Horton, near Basingstoke, the
young surgeon had a clear run of six miles in every
direction, and took his fifteen hundred pounds a
year, though, as is usual in country practices, the
stable swallowed up most of what the consulting-room
earned.

Dr. James Ripley was two-and-thirty years of age,
reserved, learned, unmarried, with set, rather stern
features, and a thinning of the dark hair upon the
top of his head, which was worth quite a hundred a
year to him. He was particularly happy in
his management of ladies. He had caught the tone of
bland sternness and decisive suavity which dominates
without offending. Ladies, however, were not equally
happy in their management of him. Professionally, he
was always at their service. Socially, he was a drop
of quicksilver. In vain the country mammas spread
out their simple lures in front of him. Dances and
picnics were not to his taste, and he preferred
during his scanty leisure to shut himself up in his
study, and to bury himself in Virchow's Archives and
the professional journals.

Study was a passion with him, and he would have
none of the rust which often gathers round a country
practitioner. It was his ambition to keep his
knowledge as fresh and bright as at the moment when
he had stepped out of the examination hall. He
prided himself on being able at a moment's notice to
rattle off the seven ramifications of some obscure
artery, or to give the exact percentage of any
physiological compound. After a long day's work he
would sit up half the night performing iridectomies
and extractions upon the sheep's eyes sent in by the
village butcher, to the horror of his housekeeper,
who had to remove the debris next morning. His
love for his work was the one fanaticism which found
a place in his dry, precise nature.

It was the more to his credit that he should
keep up to date in his knowledge, since he had
no competition to force him to exertion. In the
seven years during which he had practised in Hoyland
three rivals had pitted themselves against him, two
in the village itself and one in the neighbouring
hamlet of Lower Hoyland. Of these one had sickened
and wasted, being, as it was said, himself the only
patient