He was very good and, above all, he was very good-looking. He was a very good young man, went to church two or three times on a Sunday, and would on no account have broken any one of the Ten Commandments on the painted tablets above the altar by so much as a thought. He spoke and wrote tolerable English, had read Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, and infinitely preferred the latter, though he made a point of skipping the first few chapters of the great novelist's fictions in order to get at once to the action of the story. He wrote a fair business-like hand, was an excellent arithmetician, remembered a smattering of Latin, a random line here and there from those Roman poets and philosophers whose writings had been his torment at a certain classical and commercial academy at Wareham. He was tall, straight, and muscular a good runner, a first-rate cricketer, tolerably skilful with a pair of boxing-gloves or single-sticks, and a decent shot.
Luckily for the boy, he was only a common-place lad, with a good-looking, rosy face clear grey eyes, which stared at you frankly and a thick stubble of brown hair, parted in the middle and waving from the roots. If John Gilbert's only child had possessed the capacity of a Newton or the aspirations of a Napoleon, the surgeon would nevertheless have shut him up in the surgery to compound aloes and conserve of roses, tincture of rhubarb and essence of peppermint. He had inherited his own patients and the parish patients from his father, who had been a surgeon before him, and who had lived in the same house, with the same red lamp over the little old-fashioned surgery-door, for eight-and-forty years, and had died, leaving the house, the practice, and the red lamp to his son. Gilbert's mind was narrowed by the circle in which he lived. It was for this reason, most likely, that the surgeon loved his child as children are rarely loved by their fathers – with an earnest, over-anxious devotion, which from the very first had been something womanly in its character, and which grew with the child's growth. He had married late in life, and his wife had died very soon after the birth of this son.
John Gilbert was an elderly man, with a young son. Pawlkatt derived from his aristocratic patients. Pawlkatt, who lived in a big, new, brazen-faced house in the middle of the queer old High Street and John Gilbert, the parish doctor, who lived in his own house on the outskirts of Graybridge, and worked very hard for a smaller income than that which the stylish Mr. There were two surgeons in the little town of Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne, in pretty pastoral Midlandshire, – Mr.
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