to post it," Mrs. Branscome pleaded.

"Yes; we must believe that. Good-bye!"

For a moment he stayed to watch her white figure, outlined against the
dusk of the room, and then gently closed the door on her. The next
morning David left England, not, however, for Grindelwald. He dreaded
the morbid selfishness which grows from isolation, and sought a
finishing school in the companionship of practical men.

THE TWENTY-KRONER STORY.

The surgeon has a weakness for men who make their living on the sea.
From the skipper of a Dogger Bank fishing-smack to the stoker of a
Cardiff tramp, from Margate 'longshoreman to a crabber of the Stilly
Isles, he embraces them all in a lusty affection. And this not merely
out of his own love of salt water but because his diagnosis reveals
the gentleman in them more surely than in the general run of his
wealthier patients. "A primitive gentleman, if you like," Lincott will
say, "not above tearing his meat with his fingers or wearing the
same shirt night and day for a couple of months on end, but still a
gentleman." As one of the innumerable instances which had built up his
conviction, Lincott will offer you the twenty-kroner story.

As he was walking through the wards of his hospital he stopped for
a moment by the bed of a brewer's drayman who was suffering from an
access of _delirium tremens_. The drayman's language was violent and
voluble. But he sank into a coma with the usual suddenness common to
such cases, and in the pause which followed Lincott heard a gentle
voice a few beds away earnestly apologising to a nurse for the trouble
she was put to. "Why," she replied with a laugh, "I am here to be
troubled." Apologies of the kind are not so frequently heard in the
wards of an East End hospital. This one, besides, was spoken with an
accent not very pronounced, it is true, but unfamiliar. Lincott moved
down to the bed. It was occupied by a man apparently tall, with a pair
of remorseful blue eyes set in an open face, and a thatch of yellow
hair dusted with grey.

"What's the matter?" asked Lincott, and the patient explained. He was
a Norseman from Finland, fifty-three years old, and he had worked all
his life on English ships. He had risen from "decky" to mate. Then he
had injured himself, and since he could work no more he had come into
the hospital to be cured. Lincott examined him, found that a slight
operation was all the man needed, and performed it himself. In six
weeks ti