announcement that, after ample inquiry among
medical friends in London, he had satisfied himself that I was not a
suitable person for the post.

When I had heard this and convinced myself that it was substantially
true--for I was always too cautious to accept the loose and unsifted
gossip of a provincial town--I think that for the first time in my life
I experienced the passion of hate towards a human being. Why should
this man who was so rich and powerful thus devote his energies to the
destruction of a brother practitioner who was struggling and poor?
At the time I set it down to pure malice, into which without doubt it
blossomed at last, not understanding that in the first place on Sir
John's part it was in truth terror born of his own conscious mediocrity.
Like most inferior men, he was quick to recognise his master, and,
either in the course of our conversations or through inquiries that
he made concerning me, he had come to the conclusion that so far as
professional ability was concerned I _was_ his master. Therefore, being
a creature of petty and dishonest mind, he determined to crush me before
I could assert myself.

Now, having ascertained all this beyond reasonable doubt, there were
three courses open to me: to make a public attack upon Sir John, to go
away and try my fortune elsewhere, or to sit still and await events. A
more impetuous man would have adopted the first of these alternatives,
but my experience of life, confirmed as it was by the advice of Emma,
who was a shrewd and far-seeing woman, soon convinced me that if I
did so I should have no more chance of success than would an egg which
undertook a crusade against a brick wall. Doubtless the egg might stain
the wall and gather the flies of gossip about its stain, but the end
of it must be that the wall would still stand, whereas the egg would no
longer be an egg. The second plan had more attractions, but my resources
were now too low to allow me to put it into practice. Therefore, having
no other choice, I was forced to adopt the third, and, exercising
that divine patience which characterises the Eastern nations but is so
lacking in our own, to attend humbly upon fate until it should please it
to deal to me a card that I could play.

In time fate dealt to me that card and my long suffering was rewarded,
for it proved a very ace of trumps. It happened thus.

About a year after I arrived in Dunchester I was elected a member of the
City Club. It is a