noiseless boots. Jude, beginning to feel lonely, endeavoured to keep up with him.

“Well, my man! I’m in a hurry, so you’ll have to walk pretty fast if you keep alongside of me. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, I think. Physician Vilbert?”

“Ah—I’m known everywhere, I see! That comes of being a public benefactor.”Vilbert was an itinerant quack-doctor, well known to the rustic population, and absolutely unknown to anybody else, as he, indeed, took care to be, to avoid inconvenient investigations. Cottagers formed his only patients, and his Wessex-wide repute was among them alone. His position was humbler and his field more obscure than those of the quacks with capital and an organized system of advertising. He was, in fact, a survival. The distances he traversed on foot were enormous, and extended nearly the whole length and breadth of Wessex. Jude had one day seen him selling a pot of coloured lard to an old woman as a certain cure for a bad leg, the woman arranging to pay a guinea, in instalments of a shilling a fortnight, for the precious salve, which, according to the physician, could only be obtained from a particular animal which grazed on Mount Sinai, and was to be captured only at great risk to life and limb. Jude, though he already had his doubts about this gentleman’s medicines, felt him to be unquestionably a travelled personage, and one who might be a trustworthy source of information on matters not strictly professional.

“I s’pose you’ve been to Christminster, Physician?”

“I have—many times,” replied the long thin man. “That’s one of my centres.”

“It’s a wonderful city for scholarship and religion?”

“You’d say so, my boy, if you’d seen it. Why, the very sons of the old  women who do the washing of the colleges can talk in Latin—not good Latin, that I admit, as a critic: dog-Latin—cat-Latin, as we used to call it in my undergraduate days.”

“And Greek?”

“Well—that’s more for the men who are in training for bishops, that they may be able to read the New Testament in the original.”

“I want to learn Latin and Greek myself.”

“A lofty desire. You must get a grammar of each tongue.”

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