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“Have you seen much of your scientific phœnix, Lydgate, lately?” said Mr Toller at one of his Christmas dinner-parties, speaking to Mr Farebrother on his right hand.

“Not much, I am sorry to say,” answered the Vicar, accustomed to parry Mr Toller’s banter about his belief in the new medical light. “I am out of the way, and he is too busy.”

“Is he? I am glad to hear it,” said Dr Minchin, with mingled suavity and surprise.

“He gives a great deal of time to the New Hospital,” said Mr Farebrother, who had his reasons for continuing the subject: “I hear of that from my neighbour, Mrs Casaubon, who goes there often. She says Lydgate is indefatigable, and is making a fine thing of Bulstrode’s institution. He is preparing a new ward in case of the cholera coming to us.”

“And preparing theories of treatment to try on the patients, I suppose,” said Mr Toller.

“Come, Toller, be candid,” said Mr Farebrother. “You are too clever not to see the good of a bold fresh mind in medicine, as well as in everything else; and as to cholera, I fancy, none of you are very sure what you ought to do. If a man goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else.”

“I am sure you and Wrench ought to be obliged to him,” said Dr Minchin, looking towards Toller, “for he has sent you the cream of Peacock’s patients.”

“Lydgate has been living at a great rate for a young beginner,” said Mr Harry Toller, the brewer. “I suppose his relations in the North back him up.”

“I hope so,” said Mr Chichely, ”else he ought not to have married