“Oh, no, Doctor, I guess you’ll do as well as anybody.” But I wickedly replied that I thought she would be better pleased to have another doctor, and I could easily arrange it. Then she pleaded with me not to throw up the case--no one could do so well--her son would get worse if he had a change of doctors, and so on. So, not wishing to excite my patient, and thinking I had punished her enough, I condescended to keep the case. He made a good recovery, and Mrs. Lynch was one of my staunchest advocates after that, recommending me to her neighbours in glowing praise. She also recommended her son to me: “Mike do be thinkin’ a lot of you, Doctor, for savin’ his life. He’s a good boy, is Mike, and will make someone a good man; he gets twinty dollars a month, and has no bad habits, Doctor. Sure an’ a woman might do worse. But Mike says, he says to me, ‘Now, Mother, you do be talkin’ nonsense--the Doctor ain’t for the loikes of me.’” I can laugh now at the rebuffs I met on account of my youth, not only when in College, but even when practising in U----, but it was hard to laugh at them then. Hence, I suppose, the dignity I instinctively assumed to make up for my short stature and lack of years. I learned, toward the close of my medical course, that it had been customary among the students to speak of me as “the dignified little Miss Arnold.” This dignity was no pose. I was dreadfully in earnest, and felt keenly this drawback to success. There was Miss Wilkins in the same class, no older than I _as a doctor_, but her years and her spectacles were passports to immediate acceptance, and she got credit for being wise where I was scarcely tolerated. Exasperation was no name for it! I lost one obstetrical case in my third year just because of this: After I had made my first visit, the patient sent me a polite note saying her husband was unwilling to go so far as my boarding-place for a doctor; that she would have liked to have me, and hoped I wouldn’t be offended--all a pretense--she was afraid to trust herself in my hands. Under this suddenly terminated record in my note-book I wrote with a sigh, “Oh, for the bonnet and spectacles of Miss Wilkins!” Even within a few months of graduation, while shopping for a cloak, I was chagrined to have the saleswoman tell the taller, but younger, girl who, accompanying me, acted as spokesman, “Oh, you will have to take _her_ into the misses’ department.” The “misses’ department,” indeed! and I almost ready to take my degree! and I would have to be taken in--I could not even go there myself! It amuses me now to recall what a sore point this was with me.