When Parkyn recovered from his illness his mind was a blank, so far as his artistic training and the romance of the picture and corpse were concerned. I concealed the picture, deeming it unwise to revive dangerous memories in his mind. It remained in my possession for several years. I kept it hidden because it seemed a sacrilege to permit it to be gazed upon by the eyes of the commonplace. My office was finally destroyed by fire, and I confess that I was not sorry when I discovered that the trunk which contained the painting was not among the properties saved from the flames. Parkyn became a plodding practitioner in a little country town in New York State. I visited him some years later, and found that his ideals were represented by a short, dumpy, motherly, little red-headed wife and half a dozen tow-headed, freckle-faced youngsters that looked for all the world like turkey eggs and jack o’ lanterns. A MATTER OF PROFESSIONAL SECRECY The day had been a trying one. Four capital operations, between the hours of eight and ten in the morning, fifteen minutes for washing up and changing back from the rubber and white duck of the operating room to my ordinary habiliments, and with my usual fear that I was still redolent with the fumes of ether and that sickish odor of the combined horrors of blood and iodoform, I was off for my clinic at the medical school as fast as my team of thoroughbreds could take me. A strenuous hour of teaching and, my nervous force already nearly exhausted, although my day’s work had just begun, I hurried to my office, taking barely enough time _en route_ to swallow a hasty lunch. And then came an afternoon of arduous office work, with, it seemed to me, more patients and more tough problems and petty annoyances than usual. My office hours over, I was privileged to spend a half hour at dinner, before attending to several consultations. I wound up the day by calling at the hospital and looking over the cases I had operated in the morning, and was then driven homeward, fairly worn out, by what was, after all, merely an average day in the life of the college professor. It was long after midnight when I retired, congratulating myself, meanwhile, that I had completed and forwarded to the publisher the last batch of MS. for my new book, and was therefore privileged to rest my weary bones and exhausted brain. A telephone at one’s bedside is sometimes a great convenience for the physician, but there are occasions when to me it seems an invention of the devil--a something devised especially to defeat the ends of tired nature--a sort of Nemesis, which pursues one into the very midst of dreamland. When I am as tired as I was on this particular night, the ringing of my telephone bell awakens me with a sudden physical and mental shock that sets my every nerve a quiver, and makes my heart beat like a trip hammer for many minutes.