demonstration, and to knock a man's hat off his head and into the gutter rather a polite attention.
Yes, during the last eight years the prospects of Mr. Augustus Darley—(that is the name of the witness)—have been decidedly looking up. Eight years ago he was a medical student, loose on wide London; eating bread-and-cheese and drinking bottled stout in dissecting-rooms, and chalking up alarming scores at the caravansary round the corner of Goodge Street—when the proprietor of the caravansary would chalk up. There were days which that stern man refused to mark with a white stone. Now, he has a dispensary of his own; a marvellous place, which would be entirely devoted to scientific pursuits if dominoes and racing calendars did not in some degree predominate therein. This dispensary is in a populous neighbourhood on the Surrey side of the water; and in the streets and squares—to say nothing of the court and mews—round this establishment the name of Augustus Darley is synonymous with everything which is popular and pleasant. His very presence is said to be as good as physic. Now, as physic in the abstract, and apart from its curative qualities, is scarcely a very pleasant thing, this may be considered rather a doubtful compliment; but for all that, it was meant in perfect good faith, and what's more, it meant a great deal.
When anybody felt ill, he sent for Gus Darley—(he had never been called Mr. but once in his life, and then by a sheriff's officer, who, arresting him for the first time, wasn't on familiar terms; all Cursitor Street knew him as "Gus, old fellow," and "Darley, my boy," before long). If the patient was very bad, Gus told him a good story. If the case seemed a serious one, he sang a comic song. If the patient felt, in popular parlance, "low," Darley would stop to supper; and if by that time the patient was not entirely restored, his medical adviser would send him a ha'porth of Epsom salts, or three-farthings' worth of rhubarb and magnesia, jocosely labelled "The Mixture." It was a comforting delusion, laboured under by every patient of Gus Darley's, that the young surgeon prescribed for him a very mysterious and peculiar amalgamation of drugs, which, though certain death to any other man, was the only preparation in the whole pharmacopoeia that could possibly keep him alive.
There was a saying current in the neighbourhood of the dispensary, to the effect that Gus Darley's description of the Derby Day was the best Epsom salts ever invented for the cure of man's diseases; and he has been known to come home from the races at ten o'clock at night, and assist at a sick-bed (successfully), with a wet towel round his head, and a painful conviction that he was prescribing for two patients at once.
But all this time he is strolling by the swollen Sloshy, with
