"

Philip had put the book down on the table, and Doctor South took it up. It
was a volume of an edition which had belonged to the Vicar of Blackstable.
It was a thin book bound in faded morocco, with a copperplate engraving as
a frontispiece; the pages were musty with age and stained with mould.
Philip, without meaning to, started forward a little as Doctor South took
the volume in his hands, and a slight smile came into his eyes. Very
little escaped the old doctor.

"Do I amuse you?" he asked icily.

"I see you're fond of books. You can always tell by the way people handle
them."

Doctor South put down the novel immediately.

"Breakfast at eight-thirty," he said and left the room.

"What a funny old fellow!" thought Philip.

He soon discovered why Doctor South's assistants found it difficult to get
on with him. In the first place, he set his face firmly against all the
discoveries of the last thirty years: he had no patience with the drugs
which became modish, were thought to work marvellous cures, and in a few
years were discarded; he had stock mixtures which he had brought from St.
Luke's where he had been a student, and had used all his life; he found
them just as efficacious as anything that had come into fashion since.
Philip was startled at Doctor South's suspicion of asepsis; he had
accepted it in deference to universal opinion; but he used the precautions
which Philip had known insisted upon so scrupulously at the hospital with
the disdainful tolerance of a man playing at soldiers with children.

"I've seen antiseptics come along and sweep everything before them, and
then I've seen asepsis take their place. Bunkum!"

The young men who were sent down to him knew only hospital practice; and
they came with the unconcealed scorn for the General Practitioner which
they had absorbed in the air at the hospital; but they had seen only the
complicated cases which appeared in the wards; they knew how to treat an
obscure disease of the suprarenal bodies, but were helpless when consulted
for a cold in the head. Their knowledge was theoretical and their
self-assurance unbounded. Doctor South watched them with tightened lips;
he took a savage pleasure in showing them how great was their ignorance
and how unjustified their conceit. It was a poor practice, of fishing
folk, and the doctor made up his own prescriptions. Doctor South asked his
assistant how he expected to make both ends meet if he gave a fisherman
wit