gas bracket in the back room. I hammered a
splinter of wood into the wall above it, and so made an arm upon which
I could hang my little kettle and boil it over the flame. The attraction
of the idea was that there was no immediate expense, and many things
would have happened before I was called upon to pay the gas bill. The
back room was converted then into both kitchen and dining room. The sole
furniture consisted of my box, which served both as cupboard, as table,
and as chair. My eatables were all kept inside, and when I wished for a
meal I had only to pick them out and lay them on the lid, leaving room
for myself to sit beside them.

It was only when I went to my bedroom that I realised the oversights
which I had made in my furnishing. There was no mattress and no pillow
or bed-clothes. My mind had been so centred upon the essentials for the
practice, that I had never given a thought to my own private wants. I
slept that night upon the irons of my bed, and rose up like St. Lawrence
from the gridiron. My second suit of clothes with Bristowe's "Principles
of Medicine" made an excellent pillow, while on a warm June night a
man can do well wrapped in his overcoat. I had no fancy for second-hand
bed-clothes, and determined until I could buy some new ones, to make
myself a straw pillow, and to put on both my suits of clothes on the
colder nights. Two days later, however, the problem was solved in more
luxurious style by the arrival of a big brown tin box from my mother,
which was as welcome to me, and as much of a windfall, as the Spanish
wreck to Robinson Crusoe. There were too pairs of thick blankets, two
sheets, a counterpane, a pillow, a camp-stool, two stuffed bears' paws
(of all things in this world!), two terra-cotta vases, a tea-cosy, two
pictures in frames, several books, an ornamental ink-pot, and a number
of antimacassars and coloured tablecloths. It is not until you own a
table with a deal top and mahogany legs, that you understand what the
true inner meaning of an ornamental cloth is. Right on the top of this
treasure came a huge hamper from the Apothecaries' Society with the
drugs which I had ordered. When they were laid out in line, the bottles
extended right down one side of the dining-room and half down the other.
As I walked through my house and viewed my varied possessions, I
felt less radical in my views, and begun to think that there might be
something in the rights of property after all.

And I adde