or or the germs will be
getting in." As to the Darwinian theory, it struck him as being the
crowning joke of the century. "The children in the nursery and the
ancestors in the stable," he would cry, and laugh the tears out of his
eyes.

He is so very much behind the day that occasionally, as things move
round in their usual circle, he finds himself, to his bewilderment, in
the front of the fashion. Dietetic treatment, for example, had been
much in vogue in his youth, and he has more practical knowledge of it
than any one whom I have met. Massage, too, was familiar to him when
it was new to our generation. He had been trained also at a time when
instruments were in a rudimentary state, and when men learned to trust
more to their own fingers. He has a model surgical hand, muscular in
the palm, tapering in the fingers, "with an eye at the end of each." I
shall not easily forget how Dr. Patterson and I cut Sir John Sirwell,
the County Member, and were unable to find the stone. It was a
horrible moment. Both our careers were at stake. And then it was that
Dr. Winter, whom we had asked out of courtesy to be present, introduced
into the wound a finger which seemed to our excited senses to be about
nine inches long, and hooked out the stone at the end of it. "It's
always well to bring one in your waistcoat-pocket," said he with a
chuckle, "but I suppose you youngsters are above all that."

We made him president of our branch of the British Medical Association,
but he resigned after the first meeting. "The young men are too much
for me," he said. "I don't understand what they are talking about."
Yet his patients do very well. He has the healing touch--that magnetic
thing which defies explanation or analysis, but which is a very evident
fact none the less. His mere presence leaves the patient with more
hopefulness and vitality. The sight of disease affects him as dust
does a careful housewife. It makes him angry and impatient. "Tut,
tut, this will never do!" he cries, as he takes over a new case. He
would shoo Death out of the room as though he were an intrusive hen.
But when the intruder refuses to be dislodged, when the blood moves
more slowly and the eyes grow dimmer, then it is that Dr. Winter is of
more avail than all the drugs in his surgery. Dying folk cling to his
hand as if the presence of his bulk and vigour gives them more courage
to face the change; and that kindly, windbeaten face has been the las