The Waverley novels, by Sir Walter Scott, complete in 12 vol., printed from the latest English ed., embracing the author's last corrections, prefaces & notes.

THE SURGEON'S DAUGHTER. 477
of a respectable farmer on the English side of the Border, who educating
his eldest son to his own occupation, desired to make his second a medical
man, in order to avail himself of the friendship of a great man, his land-,
lord, who had offered to assist his views in life, and represented a doctor or
surgeon as the sort of person to whose advantage his interest could be most
readily applied. Middlemas and Hartley were therefore associated in their
studies. In winter they were boarded in Edinburgh, for attending the
medical classes which were necessary for taking their degree. Three or
four years thus passed on, and, from being mere boys, the two medical
aspirants shot up into young men, who, being both very good-looking, well
dressed, well bred, and having money in their pockets, became personages
of some importance in the little town of Middlemas, where there was scarce
any thing that could be termed an aristocracy, and in which beaux were
scarce and belles were plenty.
Each of the two had his especial partizans; for though the young men
themselves lived in tolerable harmony together, yet, as usual in such cases,
no one could approve of one of them, without at the same time comparing
him with, and asserting his superiority over his companion.
Both were gay, fond of dancing, and sedulous attendants on the practeezings, as he called them, of Mr. M'Fittoch, a dancing master, who, itinerant during the summer, became stationary in the winter season, and
afforded the youth of Middlemas the benefit of his instructions at the rate
of twenty lessons for five shillings sterling. On these occasions, each of
Dr. Gray's pupils had his appropriate praise. Hartley danced with most
spirit - Middlemas with a better grace. Mr. M'Fittoch would have turned
out Richard against the country-side in the minuet, and wagered the thing
dearest to him in the world, (and that was his kit,) upon his assured superiority; but he admitted Hartley was superior to him in hornpipes, jigs,
strathspeys, and reels.
In dress, Hartley was most expensive, perhaps because his father afforded
him better means of being so; but his clothes were neither so tasteful when
ney, nor so well preserved when they began to grow old, as those of Richard
Middlemas. Adam Hartley was sometimes fine, at other times rather
slovenly, and on the former occasions looked rather too conscious of his
splendour. His chum was at all times regularly neat and well dressed;
while at the same time he had an air of good-breeding, which made him
appear always at ease; so that his dress, whatever it was, seemed to be just
what he ought to have worn at the time.
In their persons there was a still more strongly marked distinction.
Adam Hartley was full middle size, stout, and well limbed; and an open
English countenance, of the genuine Saxon mould, showed itself among
chestnut locks, until the hair-dresser destroyed them. He loved the rough
exercises of wrestling, boxing, leaping, and quarterstaff, and frequented,
when he could obtain leisure, the bull-baitings and foot-ball matches, by
which the burgh was sometimes enlivened.
Richard, on the contrary, was dark, like his father and mother, with high
features, beautifully formed, but exhibiting something of a foreign charac.
ter; and his person was tall and slim, though muscular and active. His
address and manners must have been natural to him, for they were, in elegance and ease, far beyond any example which he could have found in his
native burgh. He learned the use of the small-sword while in Edinburgh,
and took lessons from a performer at the theatre, with the purpose of refining
his mode of speaking. He became also an amateur of the drama, regularly
attending the playhouse, and assuming the tone of a critic in that and other
lighter departments of literature. To fill up the contrast, so far as- taste
was concerned, Richard was a dexterous and successful angler —Adam, a
bold and unerring shot. Their efforts to surpass each other in supplying
Dr. Gray's table, rendered his housekeeping much preferable to what it had