"And what, sir," the young wife timidly asked of the surgeon, when he had come down-stairs into her little drawing-room, "is your fee?" "Oh, let's see--distance from town, hundred miles. Yes. Then my fee is a hundred guineas!" Turning deadly pale with fright (for the sum was ten times the highest amount the poor girl had thought of as a likely fee) she rose, and left the room, saying, "Will you be kind enough to wait for a few minutes?" Luckily her brother (like her husband, a clergyman, with very moderate preferment) was in the house, and he soon made his appearance in the drawing-room. "Sir," said he, addressing the operator, "my sister has just now been telling me the embarrassment she is in, and I think it best to repeat her story frankly. She is quite inexperienced in money matters, and sent for you without ever asking what the ordinary fee to so distinguished a surgeon as yourself, for coming so far from London, might be. Well, sir, it is right you should know her circumstances. My brother-in-law has no property but his small living, which does not yield him more than £400 per annum, and he has already two children. My sister has no private fortune whatever, at present, and all she has in prospect is the reversion of a trifling sum--at a distant period. Poverty is the only stigma that time has fixed upon my family. Now, sir, under the circumstances, if professional etiquette would allow of your reducing your fee to the straitened finances of my sister, it really would--would be--" "Oh, my dear sir," returned the surgeon, in a rich, unctuous voice of benevolence, "pray don't think I'm a shark. I am really deeply concerned for your poor sister. As for my demand of _a hundred guineas_, since it would be beyond her means to satisfy it, why, my dear sir, I shall be only too delighted to be allowed--_to take a hundred pounds_!"