disciple of Galen, commonly known by the name of Jeremiah Bossolton,
was a gentleman considerably more inclined to breadth than length. He
was exactly five feet one inch in height, but thick and solid as a
milestone; a wig of modern cut, carefully curled and powdered, gave
somewhat of a modish and therefore unseemly grace to a solemn eye; a
mouth drawn down at the corners; a nose that had something in it
exceedingly consequential; eyebrows sage and shaggy; ears large and
fiery; and a chin that would have done honour to a mandarin. Now Mr.
Jeremiah Bossolton had a certain peculiarity of speech to which I
shall find it difficult to do justice. Nature had impressed upon his
mind a prodigious love of the grandiloquent; Mr. Bossolton, therefore,
disdained the exact language of the vulgar, and built unto himself a
lofty fabric of words in which his sense managed very frequently to
lose itself. Moreover, upon beginning a sentence of peculiar dignity,
Mr. Bossolton was, it must be confessed, sometimes at a loss to
conclude it in a period worthy of the commencement; and this caprice
of nature which had endowed him with more words than thoughts
(necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention) drove him into a very
ingenious method of remedying the deficiency; this was simply the plan
of repeating the sense by inverting the sentence.

"How long a period of time," said Mr. Bossolton, "has elapsed since
this deeply-to-be-regretted and seriously-to-be-investigated accident
occurred?"

"Not many minutes," said Mordaunt; "make no further delay, I beseech
you, but examine the arm; it is not broken, I trust?"

"In this world, Mr. Mordaunt," said the practitioner, bowing very low,
for the person he addressed was of the most ancient lineage in the