He worked hard all day, and, after the manner of his kind, was often called up in the night; but he had his evenings for the most part to himself, to use as he listed. These precious intervals of leisure he spent in reading—reading which was chiefly professional—solacing himself sometimes with a dip into a favourite author. His library consisted of a shelf-full of books on one of the decrepit chiffoniers, and was at least select. The Greek playwrights, Shakespeare, Montaigne, St. Thomas à Kempis, Molière, Sterne, De Musset, Shelley, Keats, Byron made up his stock; and of these he never knew weariness. He opened one of these volumes haphazard when the scientific reading had been unusually tough, and he had closed his medical books with a sigh of relief, opened one of his pet volumes anywhere, and read on till he read himself into dreamland. Dreams will come, even in the Shadrack-Basin district, to a man who has not yet crossed the boundary line of his thirtieth birthday; but Lucius Davoren’s were only vague dreams, inchoate visions of future success, of the days when he was to be famous, and live among the lofty spirits of the age, and feel that he had made his name a name to be remembered in centuries to come. Perhaps every young man who has been successful at a public school and at the university begins life with the same vision; but upon Lucius the fancy had a stronger hold than on most men, and almost amounted to a belief, the belief that it was his destiny to be of use to his fellow-creatures. But he had another key to open the gates of dreamland, a key more potent than Shakespeare. When things had gone well with him, when in the day’s work there had been some little professional success, some question that interested his keen fancy, and had been solved to his satisfaction; above all, when he had done some good thing for his fellow-creatures, he would take a shining mahogany-case from the chiffonier beneath his book-shelf, lay it tenderly on the table, as if it were a living thing, open it with a dainty little key which he wore attached to his watch-chain, and draw forth his priceless treasure, the Amati violin, for which he, to whom pounds were verily pounds, had given in his early student days the sum of one hundred guineas. How many deprivations, how many small sacrifices—gloves, opera-tickets, ay, even dinners—that violin represented! He naturally loved it so much the better for the pangs it had cost him. He had earned it, if not with the sweat of his brow, at least by the exercise of supreme self-denial.