I must not give the impression that I was wilfully taking fees from these people for nothing. They had just enough discomfort or fear of illness to warrant the request that I should add them to my visiting list, and I was never an Abernethy, to call them humbugs and refuse to waste my time under their roofs; but with less money or more to do they would have forgotten my existence. Indolence and riches, in others, are the medical profession’s best friends. A country doctor in those days was valued for his sociability as much almost as for his skill, and there are cases when a pleasantry or two can do more good than the whole pharmacopoeia. If he can see the opportunity of being useful as a mind-doctor as well as the ordinary repairer of disordered bodies, I think that the practitioner should embrace it and take a fee for it without a blush. My own circle of semi-friendly patients was large. There was Mrs. O’Gorman, for instance. Mrs. O’Gorman was the widow of an Irish landlord, a little lady, then between fifty and sixty, with a great gift of shrewdness and no belief in mincing her words, who was just sufficiently rheumatic to get three half-hours a week of my society, and perhaps an extra one if I chanced to be passing that way on an irregular day. She lived in luxury in a big house, with a companion called Julia, and read everything that was published both in books and periodicals; and everything that she read reminded her of something. You know the elusive Irish mind leaping from branch to branch; well, she had that, and a marvellous memory at the back of it. But whatever might be her theme, she always came back to Rose, who now and then was deposited at her house by me in the morning and picked up on my return from my rounds, replete with exotic food and burdened with gifts. “And how’s the colleen to-day?” Mrs. O’Gorman would say, after the latest ravages wrought by uric acid on her system had been carefully described. “Damn the stuff! What’s it for, anyway? Just to keep doctors in affluence, I suppose. If the good God had asked me to help Him in making the world, which I’d take shame to put my signature to as it is, I’d have left uric acid out of it. Yes, and doctors too! Every doctor is a confession of failure on the Creator’s part. “Have you read the article in the ‘Nineteenth Century’ on Genesis? Is it the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ Julia, or the ‘Contemporary’? It doesn’t matter which, they’re both half a crown and not worth it. The man sweeps away the Garden of Eden like dust on a piano. And that reminds me, we’re going to London to hear Arpeggio. They say he’s better than Liszt, although he has short hair. But he’s a devil among the ladies, just the same.