thusiastic old Englishman had passed--and the argument went on.
What reward could I expect from such a life at the end of my years,
either in ambition, honour or conscience? An unanswerable question. But
I felt no longer crushed. Then our eyes met and a genuine emotion was
visible in his as well as in mine. The end came all at once. He picked
up the knapsack suddenly and got on to his feet.

"You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote. That's what you are."

I was surprised. I was only fifteen and did not know what he meant
exactly. But I felt vaguely flattered at the name of the immortal knight
turning up in connection with my own folly, as some people would call it
to my face. Alas! I don't think there was anything to be proud of. Mine
was not the stuff the protectors of forlorn damsels, the redressers of
this world's wrongs are made of; and my tutor was the man to know that
best. Therein, in his indignation, he was superior to the barber and the
priest when he flung at me an honoured name like a reproach.

I walked behind him for full five minutes; then without looking back he
stopped. The shadows of distant peaks were lengthening over the Furca
Pass. When I came up to him he turned to me and in full view of the
Finster-Aarhorn, with his band of giant brothers rearing their
monstrous heads against a brilliant sky, put his hand on my shoulder
affectionately.

"Well! That's enough. We will have no more of it."

And indeed there was no more question of my mysterious vocation between
us. There was to be no more question of it at all, nowhere or with any
one. We began the descent of the Furca Pass conversing merrily. Eleven
years later, month for month, I stood on Tower Hill on the steps of the
St. Katherine's Dockhouse, a master in the British Merchant Service. But
the man who put his hand on my shoulder at the top of the Furca Pass was
no longer living.

That very year of our travels he took his degree of the Philosophical
Faculty--and only then his true vocation declared itself. Obedient to
the call he entered at once upon the four-year course of the Medical
Schools. A day came when, on the deck of a ship moored in Calcutta, I
opened a letter telling me of the end of an enviable existence. He had
made for himself a practice in some obscure little town of Austrian
Galicia. And the letter went on to tell me how all the bereaved poor of
the district, Christians and Jews alike, had mobbed the good doctor's
coffin