an carry them very well
under my arm. Good-night, my son, and take my tip as to your
neighbour."

When Hastie, bearing his anatomical plunder, had clattered off down the
winding stair, Abercrombie Smith hurled his pipe into the wastepaper
basket, and drawing his chair nearer to the lamp, plunged into a
formidable green-covered volume, adorned with great colored maps of
that strange internal kingdom of which we are the hapless and helpless
monarchs. Though a freshman at Oxford, the student was not so in
medicine, for he had worked for four years at Glasgow and at Berlin,
and this coming examination would place him finally as a member of his
profession. With his firm mouth, broad forehead, and clear-cut,
somewhat hard-featured face, he was a man who, if he had no brilliant
talent, was yet so dogged, so patient, and so strong that he might in
the end overtop a more showy genius. A man who can hold his own among
Scotchmen and North Germans is not a man to be easily set back. Smith
had left a name at Glasgow and at Berlin, and he was bent now upon
doing as much at Oxford, if hard work and devotion could accomplish it.

He had sat reading for about an hour, and the hands of the noisy
carriage clock upon the side table were rapidly closing together upon
the twelve, when a sudden sound fell upon the student's ear--a sharp,
rather shrill sound, like the hissing intake of a man's breath who
gasps under some strong emotion. Smith laid down his book and slanted
his ear to listen. There was no one on either side or above him, so
that the interruption came certainly from the neighbour beneath--the
same neighbour of whom Hastie had given so unsavoury an account. Smith
knew him only as a flabby, pale-faced man of silent and studious
habits, a man, whose lamp threw a golden bar from the old turret even
after he had extinguished his own. This community in lateness had
formed a certain silent bond between them. It was soothing to Smith
when the hours stole on towards dawning to feel that there was another
so close who set as small a value upon his sleep as he did. Even now,
as his thoughts turned towards him, Smith's feelings were kindly.
Hastie was a good fellow, but he was rough, strong-fibred, with no
imagination or sympathy. He could not tolerate departures from what he
looked upon as the model type of manliness. If a man could not be
measured by a public-school standard, then he was beyond the pale with
Hastie. Like s