"Fine turbit! fine fresh Grimsby turbit!" shouted a man with a barrow. As he turned down a darker by-street, a phosphorescent glimmer shone from his pile of stale plaice as a testimony to eternal truth! Peter Ramsay, house surgeon to St. Peter's Hospital round the corner, making his way thither on his bicycle, followed on the glimmer, vaguely interested as to whether that semi-putrescent fish bought for Sunday's breakfast would send him a new patient. "It's fresh, is it?" asked a wistful-looking old woman from a doorway. "Smell it, laidy! There ain't no extry charge," retorted the coster surlily. The old woman shook her head. That test was too stern. "She comes from Cornwall," she murmured to herself, "so 'twud put her more in mind o' 'ome, nor liver, wouldn't it?" There was a chink of coppers behind Peter Ramsay as he rode on, thinking that some folk ought to be punished for trying to ptomaine-poison the king's lieges. But his mind was full of something else, and before five minutes were over, he was looking down on a sleeping boy, and wondering vaguely for the hundredth time if he or the other doctors were right? Would an operation--not a known one, of course, but one based on new lines--be of any use or not? He would dearly have liked to try. In truth here, in the spick and span ward, amid those who had been brought in sickened by that outside squalor, it was difficult to realise any lack of hygiene, any lack of fair dealing. Yet that lack had left its mark on the sleeping face of the boy. It lay with a cunning elusive look on its sharp features among the white pillows. What a shutting of the door when the steed was stolen it all was! Looking at him critically, preternaturally sharp, preternaturally diseased in mind and body as he was, it seemed to be a life not much worth saving; and yet!--if it could be saved! The upright wrinkles on Peter Ramsay's forehead corrugated the transverse ones as he told himself it was useless to think of it here; in Vienna it would have been different. He had already so far as in him lay encouraged the performance of a critical new operation the very next week, and one was enough at a time. He was very keen, very confident, this young surgeon, fresh from his life abroad; ready to criticise even his superiors if they seemed to him old-fashioned. For his hands reaching out into the darkness around him had felt the touch of Something--Something that he would not lose touch of though it eluded him; so he followed it fast, almost heedlessly.