After waiting an hour at the third desk they sent me into a nearby room to have all my teeth X-rayed. This completed, I plucked up more courage, and taking my fourth envelope I wandered about among the crowd, looking for the specified desk, which I finally located two floors below. The attendant there, like all the others, asked me to “take a chair”--a phrase that one hears repeated everywhere, until eventually it gets on your nerves. After a couple of hours or so I got up and asked the desk girl how much longer she thought I’d have to wait. “The doctor will see you in your turn. Take a chair, please.” After a few days you get so that, like a trained monkey, you instinctively look for a chair the moment you approach a desk. You sit and sit--anywhere from an hour to all day. Your chief amusement consists of looking about, wondering what’s the matter with this or that one. The majority of the patients wore a look of calm but determined resignation, and naturally I supposed that most of them had kidney-stones. Unless someone stumbles over your feet, you are rarely disturbed, whether awake or asleep, therefore it is necessary to exercise due caution that you are at the right desk; otherwise you may sit all day till closing time before discovering your error. When your turn comes, if you happen to be asleep from exhaustion you automatically revert to the foot of the line, which is apt to mean the loss of a whole day. But time means absolutely nothing here--to anyone but the patients. If you ask the diagnostician when you’ll be through he answers evasively, “As soon as we have completed your examinations.” There is something contagious about clinical examinations: the first one calls for at least two more, the next two show that you need five or six others, and so on _ad infinitum_, until you feel like a fellow in the dark, hunting for the last link in an endless chain. Another stereotyped phrase that one hears on entering most of the examination rooms is, “Strip to the waist.” You are sent to a little _un_dressing booth and furnished with a sort of loose flowing Chinese robe to take the place of your upper garments. On being directed to one of these booths, and finding it already occupied, I sauntered along the hallway and presently found another similar looking room, with the door slightly ajar. Without observing the “For Women” sign overhead, I opened the door and switched on the light, supposing the room to be unoccupied. But a loud shriek from a back corner disclosed my error; and frightened almost out of my senses, I turned about to find myself face to face with a squatty, florid-featured Amazon, whose _dishabille_ indicated that she had rather exceeded the examiner’s customary directions to strip only to the waist. With an impromptu word of apology, I was making a hasty exit, when she snarled, “Can you _beat_ it!”