Cormorant Crag: A Tale of the Smuggling Days

“Here, you, Vince!” cried Doctor Burnet, pausing in his surgery with a bottle in each hand—one large and the other small, the latter about to be filled for the benefit of a patient who believed himself to be very ill and felt aggrieved when his medical adviser told him that he would be quite well if he did not eat so much.
“Yes, father.”
The boy walked up to the surgery door at the end of the long, low granite house.
“Upon my word!” cried the Doctor; “it’s lucky we have nobody here to see you. No one would ever take you for a gentleman’s son.”
“Why not, father?”
“Why not, sir! Look at your trousers and your boots.”
Vincent Burnet looked down, and then up in his father’s face.
“Trousers a bit tight across the knee,” he said deprecatingly. “The cloth gave way.”
“And were your boots too tight at the toes, sir? Look at them.”
“They always wear out there,” said Vincent; and he once more looked down, beyond the great tear across the right knee of his trousers, to his boots, whose toes seemed each to have developed a wide mouth, within which appeared something which looked like a great grey tongue.
“I don’t think this pair were very good leather, father,” he said apologetically.