My room-mates were most agreeable associates, although not altogether harmonious in tastes and methods of study. Two were young Southerners--men of superior attainments, but typic ladies’ men, and fond of social dissipation and excitement. Both were possessed of some means, and had adopted our mode of living because of social and bohemian instincts rather than from motives of economy. Time was an unimportant factor with them, hence they rarely suffered from over-study, although they were often the worse for the wear and tear of social dissipation. If ever there was a well matched pair of college cronies it was my young friends, Will Richardson and Charles Favell. The fourth member of our circle, Harold Parkyn, was about my own age, and as different from our jovial room-mates as possible. He had been an artist, it seems, and an unappreciated one, which was no fault of his, for he had talent that fell but little short of genius. Despairing of success in his chosen profession and abhorring commercial pursuits, he had entered medicine at a rather late period in life. I have rarely met a man so ill adapted by nature to medicine as was Parkyn. He was a fine, athletic, handsome fellow, with a clear cut, refined and classical face, and magnificent dark eyes which evidenced a temperament far too esthetic, and emotional faculties too exalted and sensitive to withstand the physical and mental strain incidental to intimate association with human suffering. His first visit to the dissecting room was harrowing to witness, and it was weeks before he made an attempt to qualify in practical anatomy. At his first surgical clinic he fainted outright. A large part of the disagreeable features of caring for the sick filled him with disgust. And yet, Parkyn was plucky; his was not a spirit to be easily discouraged, and he applied himself persistently to the task of subduing his finer feelings and acquiring the proverbial callosity of the medical student--an effort in which he most signally failed. Parkyn was not only of a delicately sensitive nervous organization, but he was rather peculiar in his ways. Affable at times--when his chums were indulging in jollity--he was generally one of the most reserved and taciturn men I have ever met; especially was he unsocial in the presence of ladies. So noticeable was this peculiarity that the young women of the household had dubbed him “Old Crusty”--which disturbed his serenity not at all, even when Richardson and Favell, in a spirit of mischief and with great show of formality, adopted the sobriquet applied to him by the ladies. In grave and solemn caucus these young gentlemen decided that Parkyn was a confirmed woman hater, and deservedly doomed to die an old bachelor. Their favorite occupation was the reading of love letters which they pretended to have received, and the exhibition of photographs of pretty girls to “Old Crusty.”