The surgeon took his seat at the foot of the first bed in the sick chamber, and the students crowded eagerly around him, evidently anxious not to lose a syllable that should fall from his lips. I shall never forget the lesson of that morning. The judgment, the penetration, the unflinching collectedness, and consummate skill of the surgeon, compelled my warmest admiration. I forgot our ground of disagreement in the transcendent ability that I beheld. His heart, and mind, and soul, were given up to his profession, and his success was adequate to the price paid for its purchase. The baron was, however, a mass of contradiction. I discovered this before we had been an hour in the ward. It was clear that he had risen by the sheer strength of great natural genius, and that he was lamentably wanting in all the agreeable qualities which spring from early cultivation and sound training. He was violent, sudden, and irregular in his temper and mode of speaking--when his temper and speech were directed against any but his patients. He had no regard to the feelings of men of his own rank; and his language towards them was rather emphatic, than delicate or well chosen. In his progress round the ward, he came to the bed of a man suffering from a diseased leg. He removed the bandage from the part, and asked, "what fool had tied it up so clumsily;" _the fool_, as he well knew, being the house surgeon at his side. Again, another practitioner at the hospital had recommended a particular treatment in a particular case. This gentleman, the baron's colleague, was referred to as--"a child who had yet to learn the alphabet of surgery--who would have been laughed at, twenty years ago, had he prescribed such antiquated nostrums--a weak child--a mere baby, gentlemen."----"How much," I exclaimed mentally, time after time, "must this man have altered since H---- parted with him as his respected friend!" And yet in some regards he was not altered at all. There was the same consideration for the poor sufferers--the same attention to their many complaints and wants--the same tenderness and kind disposition to humour and pacify them, which H---- had dwelt upon with so much commendation. There was no hurrying from case to case--no sign of impatience at the reiterated unmeaning queries of the patients--no coarse jest at _their_ expense--not a syllable that could wound the susceptibility of the most sensitive. Did one poor fellow betray an anxiety to take up as little of the baron's time as possible, and, speaking hurriedly, almost exhaust his little stock of feeble breath, it was absolutely touching to mark the happy mode in which the surgeon put the flurried one at ease. Had these creatures, paupers as they were, been rich and noble--had they, strangers as they were, been brothers every one, he could not have evinced a tenderer interest on their behalf--a stronger disposition to do them service. In spite of myself, I loved the baron for his condescending to these men of low