they were over, self-interest had still
remained the strongest force. To attain, to gain what he desired most
for himself, had brought him to this country practice, and for a while
he was in danger of quenching finally the generous impulses that were a
part of his nature. But until Gilbert Allen had almost reached man's
estate there had been a good mother in his home, one who had never
failed, day and night, to lay her boy's highest welfare before her God.
So it was impossible that he should go very far astray, and now, all
unknowing, he was turning into the path where that mother had always
desired he should walk. He had set himself the task of reaching the
shining mark of success, all for his own ends; but he found the road to
it so absorbing, the daily duty demanding so strenuously the
obliteration of self, that, little by little, he was losing sight of
his own interests and living primarily for the people that needed his
help. He smiled at himself in surprise one day, when, after an
unusually busy fortnight, he found that he had forgotten to keep any
account of the money owing him. That was not the Gilbert Allen who had
sat down, in the first days of his career as a physician, to calculate
carefully just how much each mile would bring. He found it was hard
for a true physician to be selfish.

And as he went about his task of relieving pain, day by day,
unconsciously he was trying to live up to the high ideal that Elmbrook
had placed for him.

"Give a dog a bad name and you can be hanging him," quoted old Hughie
Cameron one evening when the doctor had joined the company on the
milkstand, and the talk was more than usually profound. "That will be
a true saying, indeed. But, hoots! toots! it will be working the other
way, whatever. Give him a good name, now, and----"

"And he'll git up on his hind legs and walk like a man," said Spectacle
John Cross, much to Uncle Hughie's disgust.

Dr. Allen had merely laughed, and forgotten the remark soon after.
Nevertheless, the underlying truth was working out in his own life. He
was being made a better man because he had been given a fine name and
reputation. He had no petty conceit to be fed by his patients'
adulation. It brought him only a saving sense of his own shortcomings
and an honest desire to be more worthy. And there had been still
another influence at work, one of which he was entirely
unconscious--the quiet life of noble self-sacrifice lived by the gi