XIV

WITH REFERENCE TO DICK VAUGHAN


One might search the English villages through without finding another
such medical practitioner as Dr. Vaughan, the man who dressed Betty
Murdoch's sprained ankle. For example, he was a Fellow of the Royal
Society, and the records of his original-research work won respectful
attention in at least four languages. When he inherited Upcroft (the
estate which flanks Nuthill to the eastward) and decided to establish
himself there, it certainly was not with any idea of playing the general
practitioner. But, as the event proved, he was given small choice. For
Sussex this district is curiously remote. It contains a few scattered
large houses, and outside these the population is made up of small
farmers and shepherds, very good fellows, most of them, but not at all
typical of home-county residents, and having more than a little in
common with the dalesmen of the north country. Their nearest resident
medical practitioner, before Dr. Vaughan came, was eight miles away, in
Lewes.

Dr. Vaughan used to say that his only son, Dick, should relieve him by
forming a practice in the district. But that was before Dick was sent
down from Oxford for ducking his tutor in the basin of a fountain and
then trying to revive that unfortunate gentleman by plastering his head
and face in chocolate meringues. It was prior also to Dick's unfortunate
expulsion from Guy's as the result of a stand-up fight with a
house-surgeon, and to his final withdrawal from the study of medicine as
a profession he was adjudged unworthy to adorn. The judgment was
emphatically indorsed by the young man himself, and so could not be