discomposure. Crusty Hannah averred that their caps were much rumpled;
but this view of the thing was questioned; though it were certain that
the Doctor called after them downstairs, that, had they been younger
and prettier, they would have fared worse. A male emissary, who was
admitted on the supposition of his being a patient, did fare worse; for
(the grim Doctor having been particularly intimate with the black
bottle that afternoon) there was, about ten minutes after the visitor's
entrance, a sudden fierce upraising of the Doctor's growl; then a
struggle that shook the house; and, finally, a terrible rumbling down
the stairs, which proved to be caused by the precipitate descent of the
hapless visitor; who, if he needed no assistance of the grim Doctor on
his entrance, certainly would have been the better for a plaster or two
after his departure.

Such were the terms on which Doctor Grimshawe now stood with his
adopted townspeople; and if we consider the dull little town to be full
of exaggerated stories about the Doctor's oddities, many of them
forged, all retailed in an unfriendly spirit; misconceptions of a
character which, in its best and most candidly interpreted aspects, was
sufficiently amenable to censure; surmises taken for certainties;
superstitions--the genuine hereditary offspring of the frame of public
mind which produced the witchcraft delusion--all fermenting together;
and all this evil and uncharitableness taking the delusive hue of
benevolent interest in two helpless children;--we may partly judge what
was the odium in which the grim Doctor dwelt, and amid which he walked.
The horrid suspicion, too, countenanced by his abode in the corner of
the graveyard, affording the terrible Doctor such facilities for making
free, like a ghoul as he was, with the relics of mortality from the
earliest progenitor to the man killed yesterday by the Doctor's own
drugs, was not likely to improve his reputation.