There was not a plethora of patients in the Shadrack-road, nor were the cases which presented themselves to Mr. Davoren for the most part of a deeply-interesting character. He had a good supply of casualties, from broken limbs, dislocated shoulders, collar bones, and crushed ribs, down to black eyes; he had numerous cases of a purely domestic nature—cases which called him out of his bed of nights; and he had a good many small patients in the narrow streets and airless alleys—little sufferers whose quiet endurance, whose meek acceptance of pain as a necessity of their lives, moved him more than he would have cared to confess. So profound a pity as he sometimes felt for these little ones would have seemed hardly professional. His practice among children was singularly fortunate. He did not drench them with those nauseous compounds which previous practitioners had freely administered in a rough-and-ready off-hand fashion; but he did, with a very small amount of drugs, for the most part succeed in setting these delicate machines in order, restoring health’s natural hue to pallid cheeks, breathing life into feeble lungs. It was painful to him often to find himself obliged to prescribe good broths and nourishing solids where an empty larder and an unfurnished purse stared him, as it were, palpably in the face; and there were many occasions when he eked out his instructions with contributions in kind—a shilling’s worth of beef or a couple of mutton-chops, from the butcher at the end of the street, a gill of port from the nearest tavern. But him, too, Poverty held in his iron grip, and it was not always that he could afford to part with so much as a shilling.