"Six months after I began to study I loathed medicine. To use a favourite expression here, it was neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor guid red herrin'. It was neither art, science, literature, nor philosophy. It was a hideous pot-pourri of all four, with a preponderating, overwhelming admixture of arrant humbug. Hitherto I had worked fairly well, but there had never been any moral value in my work. It was done _con amore_. Now that the _amor_ failed, I scarcely worked at all. I suppose it was one of Nature's revenges that, as I had gone into a profession because it demanded silent work, I talked more in those years than at any other period of my life. I read all things rather than medicine, I moved in any society rather than the medical world, but I rubbed along somehow. I passed my first examination by a fluke, and I passed the second likewise. I never was at a loss for a brilliant theory to account for erroneous facts, and with some examiners that goes a long way. When it came to preparing for my Final, I hated surgery because I had scamped my anatomy. Medicine might have shared the same fate, but I had done a good deal of physiology in Gaskell's laboratory at Cambridge--more than was necessary, in fact--for the supposed connection between physiology and medicine is a purely fictitious one. The student has to take a header blindfold from the one to the other. It is almost incredible, but when I went up for my Final in due course, I did scrape through by the skin of my teeth. If ever any man got through those three examinations without a spill on the strength of less knowledge than I did, I should like to shake that man's hand. He deserves to be congratulated. "The next thing was to look out for a practice, or a _locum tenency_; but, before doing so, I went down to Cambridge to visit some friends. While there I saw a good deal of M'Diarmid, the Professor of Anatomy. I don't know if you ever heard of him, but if ever a man made literal dry bones live, he does. Thoroughgoing to the soles of his boots--a monument of erudition--and yet with a mind open to fresh light as regards the minutest detail." Mona flushed crimson, but fortunately he was not looking. This was indeed approaching dangerous ground. She was strongly inclined to think that the professor in question was one of "the potent, grave, and reverend signiors" in her sketch-book. "It was so odd," continued Dudley. "All my life, while other men walked in shadow, I had seemed to see the light of the eternal, but in medicine I had missed it absolutely. Ah, well! one word will do for a thousand. I am afraid I wrote my 'Sorrows of Werther' once more, for the last time in this world let us hope, and then I began all over again to work for a London degree." He stopped with an unpleasant sensation of self-consciousness. "And I wonder why I have inflicted all this on you," he said, a little coldly.