edical Association. Twenty coffee cups, a dozer liqueur
glasses, and a solid bank of blue smoke which swirls slowly along the
high, gilded ceiling gives a hint of a successful gathering. But the
members have shredded off to their homes. The line of heavy,
bulge-pocketed overcoats and of stethoscope-bearing top hats is gone
from the hotel corridor. Round the fire in the sitting-room three
medicos are still lingering, however, all smoking and arguing, while a
fourth, who is a mere layman and young at that, sits back at the table.
Under cover of an open journal he is writing furiously with a
stylographic pen, asking a question in an innocent voice from time to
time and so flickering up the conversation whenever it shows a tendency
to wane.

The three men are all of that staid middle age which begins early and
lasts late in the profession. They are none of them famous, yet each
is of good repute, and a fair type of his particular branch. The
portly man with the authoritative manner and the white, vitriol splash
upon his cheek is Charley Manson, chief of the Wormley Asylum, and
author of the brilliant monograph--Obscure Nervous Lesions in the
Unmarried. He always wears his collar high like that, since the
half-successful attempt of a student of Revelations to cut his throat
with a splinter of glass. The second, with the ruddy face and the
merry brown eyes, is a general practitioner, a man of vast experience,
who, with his three assistants and his five horses, takes twenty-five
hundred a year in half-crown visits and shilling consultations out of
the poorest quarter of a great city. That cheery face of Theodore
Foster is seen at the side of a hundred sick-beds a day, and if he has
one-third more names on his visiting list than in his cash book he
always promises himself that he will get level some day when a
millionaire with a chronic complaint--the ideal combination--shall seek
his services. The third, sitting on the right with his dress shoes
shining on the top of the fender, is Hargrave, the rising surgeon. His
face has none of the broad humanity of Theodore Foster's, the eye is
stern and critical, the mouth straight and severe, but there is
strength and decision in every line of it, and it is nerve rather than
sympathy which the patient demands when he is bad enough to come to
Hargrave's door. He calls himself a jawman "a mere jawman" as he
modestly puts it, but in point of fact he is too young and too poor to