At least the event justified the young surgeon's courage and originality in the choice of a site for his life-long campaign. Indeed had he stayed in London it is certain that he would never have achieved the work he was able to consummate in the town girdled by the southern hills and washed by Northern Seas. And that work was no mean contribution to the welfare of the race. Mr. Trupp was a pioneer in the organized attack on perhaps the deadliest and most pertinacious enemy that threatens the supremacy of Man--the tubercle bacillus. And his choice of a _point-d'appui_ from which to conduct his offensive was no small factor in his success. He was, moreover, one of the men who in the last years of the nineteenth century and the earlier years of this set himself to stem the tide of luxury which in his judgment was softening the spines of the younger generation. And the helpful buffets which gave him his name, and were responsible at least for some of his triumphs, were not the outcome of spasms of irritability but of a deliberate philosophy. For Mr. Trupp, despite his kind heart, never forgot that Man with all his aspirations after heaven had but yesterday ceased to be an animal and still stood on the edge of the slough from which he had just emerged, up to his hocks in mud, the slime yet trickling from his shaggy sides. "Don't give him sympathy," he would sometimes say to an astonished father. "What he wants is the Big Stick ... Stop his allowance. He'll soon get well. Necessity's the best doctor.... Take her mother away from her. The mothers make half the invalids.... Let her get up early in the morning and take the kitchen-maid tea in bed. _She's_ a useful citizen at all events." He saw his country, so he believed, sinking into a dropsical coma before his eyes, just for want of somebody to kick it awake; and the sight made him sick and fearful. Often riding with his daughter of evenings after the day's work he would pause a moment beside the flag-staff on Beau-nez and look North East across the waste of sea dull or shining at his feet. "Can you hear him growling, Bess?" he asked his companion once. "Who?" "The Brute." Bess knew her father's ogre, and the common talk. "Is Germany the Brute?" she asked. Her father shook his head. "One of them," he answered. "Wherever Man is there the Brute is--keep that in mind when you're married, my dear. And he's always sleeping after a gorge or ravenous before one. Our Brute's asleep now he's got his belly full. Theirs"--nodding across the water--"is prowling for his prey." To Mr. Pigott he confided his belief that there was only one thing that could save England. "What's that?" asked the old school-master. "A bloody war," replied Mr. Trupp. Many other men were saying the same thing, but few of his intellectual calibre, and none of his radical views.