umerable fine wrinkles like a last year's apple. They are hardly to
be seen when he is in repose; but when he laughs his face breaks like a
starred glass, and you realise then that though he looks old, he must
be older than he looks.

How old that is I could never discover. I have often tried to find
out, and have struck his stream as high up as George IV and even the
Regency, but without ever getting quite to the source. His mind must
have been open to impressions very early, but it must also have closed
early, for the politics of the day have little interest for him, while
he is fiercely excited about questions which are entirely prehistoric.
He shakes his head when he speaks of the first Reform Bill and
expresses grave doubts as to its wisdom, and I have heard him, when he
was warmed by a glass of wine, say bitter things about Robert Peel and
his abandoning of the Corn Laws. The death of that statesman brought
the history of England to a definite close, and Dr. Winter refers to
everything which had happened since then as to an insignificant
anticlimax.

But it was only when I had myself become a medical man that I was able
to appreciate how entirely he is a survival of a past generation. He
had learned his medicine under that obsolete and forgotten system by
which a youth was apprenticed to a surgeon, in the days when the study
of anatomy was often approached through a violated grave. His views
upon his own profession are even more reactionary than in politics.
Fifty years have brought him little and deprived him of less.
Vaccination was well within the teaching of his youth, though I think
he has a secret preference for inoculation. Bleeding he would practise
freely but for public opinion. Chloroform he regards as a dangerous
innovation, and he always clicks with his tongue when it is mentioned.
He has even been known to say vain things about Laennec, and to refer
to the stethoscope as "a new-fangled French toy." He carries one in
his hat out of deference to the expectations of his patients, but he is
very hard of hearing, so that it makes little difference whether he
uses it or not.

He reads, as a duty, his weekly medical paper, so that he has a general
idea as to the advance of modern science. He always persists in
looking upon it as a huge and rather ludicrous experiment. The germ
theory of disease set him chuckling for a long time, and his favourite
joke in the sick room was to say, "Shut the do