of medicine, and, mark my words, you will have to pay for it. Always remember, Piecraft, that in medicine, as in many other things, it is not the act alone which ensures success, but the gesture with which the act is accompanied." Moreover, Piecraft held a theory which he never took the least pains to conceal, though it was extremely provoking to his patients both rich and poor. His theory was that more than half the ailments of the human body are best treated by leaving them alone. For example, a certain old gentleman having consulted him about some senile malady, the doctor had dismissed him with the following remark: "My dear sir, the best remedy for the troubles of old age is to grow still older. The matter is in your own hands." Many suchlike epigrams were reported of him, and often they constituted the sole return which the patients received for the two guineas deposited on the table of the consulting-room. Obviously this kind of thing could not go on. As most of his patients consulted Piecraft because they wished to be extensively interfered with, and objected to nothing so much as being left alone, with or without an epigram to console them, it followed of course that they seldom consulted him a second time. But beneath these peripheral causes of irritation there lay a deeper offence. The truth is that Piecraft had made himself highly obnoxious to the members of his own profession, and had acquired--though I doubt if he fully deserved it--the reputation of a traitor. "Futile as physic" was a phrase constantly on his lips; and the words, offensive as they were, were only the foam that broke forth from the deeper waters of his treachery. He had gone so far as to embark on a propaganda for what he called "the Simplification of Medical Practice," publicly proposing that a Society should be founded for that object; and in pursuance of this proposal he had published a series of articles in which he had argued that the healing art is still dominated by the spirit of Magic and encumbered with a mass of dogmatic assumptions and superstitious observances. "The Seat of Authority in Therapeutics," "Medicine without Priest and without Ritual," "Big Words and Little Bottles," were the titles of some of these abominable essays. The last-named especially had aroused great indignation, not only by the excessively vehement language in which Piecraft pleaded for "simple and rational" principles, but far more by a caustic parallel he had drawn between the doings of a successful London practitioner and the ritual of a medicine-man among the Australian aborigines. The offence went deep, and the matter became the more serious for Piecraft because the indignation extended from the doctors to the theologians, who suspected--though the suspicion was utterly unfounded--that under the cover of an attack on orthodox medicine he was really engaged in putting a knife, from the back, into official religion; a suspicion which deprived the unfortunate doctor of