you often spend upon a single meal, will be very much to your
advantage." Such an address would be a degradation to the high and
lofty profession of Medicine, and there are no such sticklers for the
ethics of that profession as some to whom she has been but a bitter and
a grudging mother.

Dr. Horace Wilkinson was still looking moodily out of the window, when
there came a sharp clang at the bell. Often it had rung, and with
every ring his hopes had sprung up, only to dwindle away again, and
change to leaden disappointment, as he faced some beggar or touting
tradesman. But the doctor's spirit was young and elastic, and again,
in spite of all experience, it responded to that exhilarating summons.
He sprang to his feet, cast his eyes over the table, thrust out his
medical books a little more prominently, and hurried to the door. A
groan escaped him as he entered the hall. He could see through the
half-glazed upper panels that a gypsy van, hung round with wicker
tables and chairs, had halted before his door, and that a couple of the
vagrants, with a baby, were waiting outside. He had learned by
experience that it was better not even to parley with such people.

"I have nothing for you," said he, loosing the latch by an inch. "Go
away!"

He closed the door, but the bell clanged once more. "Get away! Get
away!" he cried impatiently, and walked back into his consulting-room.
He had hardly seated himself when the bell went for the third time. In
a towering passion he rushed back, flung open the door.

"What the----?"

"If you please, sir, we need a doctor."

In an instant he was rubbing his hands again with his blandest
professional smile. These were patients, then, whom he had tried to
hunt from his doorstep--the very first patients, whom he had waited for
so impatiently. They did not look very promising. The man, a tall,
lank-haired gypsy, had gone back to the horse's head. There remained a
small, hard-faced woman with a great bruise all round her eye. She
wore a yellow silk handkerchief round her head, and a baby, tucked in a
red shawl, was pressed to her bosom.

"Pray step in, madam," said Dr. Horace Wilkinson, with his very best
sympathetic manner. In this case, at least, there could be no mistake
as to diagnosis. "If you will sit on this sofa, I shall very soon make
you feel much more comfortable."

He poured a little water from his carafe into a saucer, made a compress
of lint, fastened it ove