safe keeping. A slip is fatal--a half slip perilous. Make
your rule of life and go by it, in spite of challenge or coaxers. It
will be remembered in your favour next morning.

And of course I do not mean merely festive societies. Literary,
debating, political, social, athletic, every one of them is a tool to
your hands. But you must show them what a good man you are. You must
throw yourself into each with energy and conviction. You will soon
find yourself on the committee--possibly the secretary, or even in the
presidential chair. Do not grudge labour where the return may be remote
and indirect. Those are the rungs up which one climbs.

That was how, when I had gained some sort of opening, I set to work to
enlarge it. I joined this. I joined that. I pushed in every direction.
I took up athletics again much to the advantage of my health, and found
that the practice benefited as well as I. My cricket form for the season
has been fair, with an average of about 20 with the bat and 9 with the
ball.

It must be allowed, however, that this system of sallying out for my
patients and leaving my consulting room empty might be less successful
if it were not for my treasure of a housekeeper. She is a marvel of
discretion, and the way in which she perjures her soul for the sake of
the practice is a constant weight upon my conscience. She is a tall,
thin woman, with a grave face and an impressive manner. Her standard
fiction, implied rather than said (with an air as if it were so
universally known that it would be absurd to put it into words) is,
that I am so pressed by the needs of my enormous practice, that any one
wishing to consult me must make their appointment very exactly and a
long time in advance.

"Dear me, now!" she says to some applicant. "He's been hurried off again.
If you'd been here half-an-hour ago he might have given you a minute.
I never saw such a thing" (confidentially). "Between you and me I don't
think he can last at it long. He's bound to break down. But come in, and
I'll do all I can for you."

Then, having carefully fastened the patient up in the consulting room,
she goes to little Paul.

"Run round to the bowling green, Master Paul," says she. "You'll find
the doctor there, I think. Just tell him that a patient is waiting for
him."

She seems in these interviews to inspire them with a kind of hushed
feeling of awe, as if they had found their way into some holy of holies.
My own actual appearance i