His house was small, inconvenient, and shabbily furnished. He had taken the furniture at a valuation from Mr. Plumsole, his predecessor—a valuation which, if it had been based on justice, should have been nothing; since a more rickety race of chairs and tables, a more evil-looking family of bedsteads and dressing-tables, chiffoniers and sofas, had never been called into being by the glue-pot. There was not a perfect set of castors in the house, or a chair which had not some radical defect in one of its legs, or a table that realised one’s notion of a correct level. Lucius was obliged to buy a tool-box and a glue-pot very soon after his investiture as proprietor of Mr. Plumsole’s goods and chattels; and a good deal of his leisure was consumed by small experiments in domestic surgery, as applied to chairs and tables. He performed the most delicate operations; reduced dislocations, and cured compound fractures in a wonderful way; with the aid of a handful of tin tacks and a halfpennyworth of glue. But he felt somehow that this was not the direct road to the mastery of a great science, and would give a weary little sigh as he went back to his medical books, after a sharp struggle with a refractory chair-leg, or an obstinate declivity in the flap of a Pembroke table. He was very poor, very patient, very much in earnest; as earnest now as he had been in those days of wild adventure in the Far West, when amid all the excitement of the chase his thoughts had ever gone beyond, searching for Nature’s secrets, longing to wrest from her vast stores of hidden wealth some treasure which might be useful to his fellow-creatures. Of all those vague unspoken hopes nothing had come. He had left no footmark behind him in that distant world; he had brought home no trophy. Nothing had resulted from all those days of hardship and peril, except a secret which it was horror to remember. He turned his face now resolutely to the real world—the cold, hard, workaday world of an over-populated city—and set himself to do what good there was for him to do in his narrow sphere. ‘It may be some atonement for the blood I shed yonder,’ he said to himself. In his small way he prospered—prospered in doing good. When he had been at this drudgery a little more than a year, the parish surgeon died—popular report said of a too genial temper and a leaning towards good fellowship, not unassociated with Irish whisky—and Lucius was elected in his stead. This gave him a pittance which helped him, paid his rent and taxes and the charwoman, and gave him admittance to the dwellings of the poor. Thus it was he came to have so many children in his case-book, and to spend his scanty surplus in small charities among his patients.