Birds of Prey | Page 3

read these circulars. Struggling householders, who find it a hard task to
keep the two ends which never have met and never will meet from
growing farther and farther asunder every year, are apt to derive a
dreary kind of satisfaction from the contemplation of another man's
impending ruin. Fitzgeorge-street and its neighbourhood had existed
without the services of a dentist, but it was very doubtful that a dentist
would be able to exist on the custom to be obtained in Fitzgeorge-street.
Mr. Sheldon may, perhaps, have pitched his tent under the impression

that wherever there was mankind there was likely to be toothache, and
that the healer of an ill so common to frail humanity could scarcely fail
to earn his bread, let him establish his abode of horror where he might.
For some time after his arrival people watched him and wondered about
him, and regarded him a little suspiciously, in spite of the substantial
clumsiness of his furniture and the unwinking brightness of his
windows. His neighbours asked one another how long all that outward
semblance of prosperity would last; and there was sinister meaning in
the question.
The Fitzgeorgians were not a little surprised, and were perhaps just a
little disappointed, on finding that the newly-established dentist did
manage to hold his ground somehow or other, and that the muslin
curtains were renewed again and again in all their spotless purity; that
the supplies of rotten-stone and oil, hearthstone and house-flannel, were
unfailing as a perennial spring; and that the unsullied snow of Mr.
Sheldon's shirt-fronts retained its primeval whiteness. Wonderland
suspicion gave place to a half-envious respect. Whether much custom
came to the dentist no one could decide. There is no trade or profession
in which the struggling man will not receive some faint show of
encouragement. Pedestrians of agonised aspect, with handkerchiefs
held convulsively before their mouths, were seen to rush wildly
towards the dentist's door, then pause for a moment, stricken by a
sudden terror, and anon feebly pull the handle of an inflexible bell.
Cabs had been heard to approach that fatal door--generally on wet days;
for there seems to be a kind of fitness in the choice of damp and dismal
weather for the extraction of teeth. Elderly ladies and gentlemen had
been known to come many times to the Fitzgeorgian mansion. There
was a legend of an old lady who had been seen to arrive in a brougham,
especially weird and nut-crackery of aspect, and to depart half an hour
afterwards a beautified and renovated creature. One half of the
Fitzgeorgians declared that Mr. Sheldon had established a very nice
little practice, and was saving money; while the other half were still
despondent, and opined that the dentist had private property, and was
eating up his little capital. It transpired in course of time that Mr.
Sheldon had left his native town of Little Barlingford, in Yorkshire,
where his father and grandfather had been surgeon-dentists before him,

to establish himself in London. He had disposed advantageously of an
excellent practice, and had transferred his household goods--the
ponderous chairs and tables, the wood whereof had deepened and
mellowed in tint under the indefatigable hand of his grandmother--to
the metropolis, speculating on the chance that his talents and
appearance, address and industry, could scarcely fail to achieve a
position. It was further known that he had a brother, an attorney in
Gray's Inn, who visited him very frequently; that he had few other
friends or acquaintance; that he was a shining example of steadiness
and sobriety; that he was on the sunnier side of thirty, a bachelor, and
very good-looking; and that his household was comprised of a
grim-visaged active old woman imported from Barlingford, a girl who
ran errands, and a boy who opened the door, attended to the
consulting-room, and did some mysterious work at odd times with a
file and sundry queer lumps of plaster-of-paris, beeswax, and bone, in a
dark little shed abutting on the yard at the back of the house. This much
had the inhabitants of Fitzgeorge-street discovered respecting Mr.
Sheldon when he had been amongst them four years; but they had
discovered no more. He had made no local acquaintances, nor had he
sought to make any. Those of his neighbours who had seen the interior
of his house had entered it as patients. They left it as much pleased with
Mr. Sheldon as one can be with a man at whose hands one has just
undergone martyrdom, and circulated a very flattering report of the
dentist's agreeable manners and delicate white handkerchief, fragrant
with the odour of eau-de-Cologne. For the rest, Philip Sheldon lived his
own life, and dreamed his own dreams. His opposite neighbours, who
watched him on sultry summer evenings as he lounged near