or
who has since made his name and fortune in Australia; another in whose
rooms were nearly a hundred cups for prowess in nearly every form of
athletics, and who also has "made good" in professional life, besides
several others who for shorter or longer periods were allotted rooms
in our house. Among the more unusual was the "C.M.," a Brahmin from
India, a priest in his youth, who had been brought back to England by
some society to be educated in medical missionary work, but whom for
some reason they had dropped. For a short time a clever young Russian
of Hebrew extraction who was studying for the Church helped to render
our common-room social engagements almost international affairs.

As I write this I am at Charleston, South Carolina, and I see how hard
it will be for an American to understand the possibility of such a
motley assembly being reasonable or even proper. It seems to me down
here that there must have been odd feelings sometimes in those days. I
can only say, however, that I never personally even thought of it.
East London is so democratic that one's standards are simply those of
the value of the man's soul as we saw it. If he had been yellow with
pink stripes it honestly would not have mattered one iota to most of
us.

It so happened that there was at that time in hospital under my care a
patient known as "the elephant man." He had been starring under that
title in a cheap vaudeville, had been seen by some of the students,
and invited over to be shown to and studied by our best physicians.
The poor fellow was really exceedingly sensitive about his most
extraordinary appearance. The disease was called "leontiasis," and
consisted of an enormous over-development of bone and skin on one
side. His head and face were so deformed as really to resemble a big
animal's head with a trunk. My arms would not reach around his hat. A
special room in a yard was allotted to him, and several famous people
came to see him--among them Queen Alexandra, then the Princess of
Wales, who afterward sent him an autographed photograph of herself.
He kept it in his room, which was known as the "elephant house," and
it always suggested beauty and the beast. Only at night could the man
venture out of doors, and it was no unusual thing in the dusk of
nightfall to meet him walking up and down in the little courtyard. He
used to talk freely of how he would look in a huge bottle of
alcohol--an end to which in his imagination he was fated