n. I can never
reconcile myself to his ideas, and yet I can never convert him to mine;
so there will be a chasm there which sooner or later may open to divide
us altogether. He will not acknowledge any philanthropic side to the
question. A profession, in his view, is a means of earning a livelihood,
and the doing good to our fellow mortals, is quite a secondary one.

"Why the devil should we do all the good, Munro?" he shouts. "Eh, what? A
butcher would do good to the race, would he not, if he served his chops
out gratis through the window? He'd be a real benefactor; but he goes
on selling them at a shilling the pound for all that. Take the case of
a doctor who devotes himself to sanitary science. He flushes out drains,
and keeps down infection. You call him a philanthropist! Well, I call
him a traitor. That's it, Munro, a traitor and a renegade! Did you ever
hear of a congress of lawyers for simplifying the law and discouraging
litigation? What are the Medical Association and the General Council,
and all these bodies for? Eh, laddie? For encouraging the best interests
of the profession. Do you suppose they do that by making the
population healthy? It's about time we had a mutiny among the general
practitioners. If I had the use of half the funds which the Association
has, I should spend part of them in drain-blocking, and the rest in the
cultivation of disease germs, and the contamination of drinking water."

Of course, I told him that his views were diabolical; but, especially
since that warning which I had from his wife, I discount everything
that he says. He begins in earnest; but as he goes on the humour of
exaggeration gets hold of him, and he winds up with things which he
would never uphold in cold blood. However, the fact remains that we
differ widely in our views of professional life, and I fear that we may
come to grief over the question.

What do you think we have been doing lately? Building a stable--no less.
Cullingworth wanted to have another one at the business place, as much,
I think, for his patients as his horses; and, in his audacious way, he
determined that he would build it himself. So at it we went, he, I,
the coachman, Mrs. Cullingworth, and the coachman's wife. We dug
foundations, got bricks in by the cartload, made our own mortar, and I
think that we shall end by making a very fair job of it. It's not quite
as flat-chested as we could wish; and I think that if I were a horse
inside it, I shoul