rs and struck deep through the green waves beyond, showing up the
purple patches where the beds of seaweed are lying. Such a morning as
that, with the wind in his hair, and the spray on his lips, and the cry
of the eddying gulls in his ear, may send a man back braced afresh to
the reek of a sick-room, and the dead, drab weariness of practice.

It was on such another day that I first saw my old man. He came to my
bench just as I was leaving it. My eye must have picked him out even
in a crowded street, for he was a man of large frame and fine presence,
with something of distinction in the set of his lip and the poise of
his head. He limped up the winding path leaning heavily upon his
stick, as though those great shoulders had become too much at last for
the failing limbs that bore them. As he approached, my eyes caught
Nature's danger signal, that faint bluish tinge in nose and lip which
tells of a labouring heart.

"The brae is a little trying, sir," said I. "Speaking as a physician,
I should say that you would do well to rest here before you go further."

He inclined his head in a stately, old-world fashion, and seated
himself upon the bench. Seeing that he had no wish to speak I was
silent also, but I could not help watching him out of the corners of my
eyes, for he was such a wonderful survival of the early half of the
century, with his low-crowned, curly-brimmed hat, his black satin tie
which fastened with a buckle at the back, and, above all, his large,
fleshy, clean-shaven face shot with its mesh of wrinkles. Those eyes,
ere they had grown dim, had looked out from the box-seat of mail
coaches, and had seen the knots of navvies as they toiled on the brown
embankments. Those lips had smiled over the first numbers of
"Pickwick," and had gossiped of the promising young man who wrote them.
The face itself was a seventy-year almanack, and every seam an entry
upon it where public as well as private sorrow left its trace. That
pucker on the forehead stood for the Mutiny, perhaps; that line of care
for the Crimean winter, it may be; and that last little sheaf of
wrinkles, as my fancy hoped, for the death of Gordon. And so, as I
dreamed in my foolish way, the old gentleman with the shining stock was
gone, and it was seventy years of a great nation's life that took shape
before me on the headland in the morning.

But he soon brought me back to earth again. As he recovered his breath
he took a letter out of his