The morning patients have an absent-minded look—a dull, foreboding look, as of people who are too busy really to enjoy themselves. Some of them, also, are accompanied by their button-holes or other objects of light and profitable home employment, at which they work with assiduity whilst waiting for the doctor’s call. Others, upon the other hand, bring peppermint drops. One lady has brought some literature—the outward wrapper of an ancient issue of a paper called _The Pilot_. So there they loll, all silent, many of them yawning—out of rudeness, or boredom, or fatigue, or something, one supposes. If you sit upon the gas-stove, you can watch them all as they come into the consulting-room. You can watch, for instance, the experienced matron, who enters with the baby that _won’t_ get well, and dumps it down, in a business-like manner, upon the doctor’s table. "There you are," she says in the manner of one who has successfully completed a conjuring trick, "look at that tongue. Did _ever_ you see sich a thrush?" "M’yes!" admits the doctor. "It’s pretty bad. I’ll give you a powder and some syrup." "Powder? Syrup?" echoes the matron. "H’m! Pity you can’t give ’im a corfin. That’s the on’y treatment what’ll give any peace to _this_ pore little swine. What mercy, _I_ say, is there in letting a thing like this live on? Look at it." When, to your great relief, the experienced matron goes away, you will be very lucky if you do not wish her back again, for it is ten to one that she will be followed by an apprentice to the trade, a poor wild thing whose senseless, shiftless, screaming mother-agony will hurt you ever so much more than the grim philosophy of the veteran. "It seems to grip ’im, Doctor," the apprentice will say, "and throw ’im down, pore lamb, an’ wrestle with ’im, Doctor, same’s there was a fish-bone in ’is little throat, and ’im so weak, ’e don’t have strength enough to ’oller, and ’im so blue and mottled, Doctor, and strangled-looking in the face, and the powder, that ain’t doin’ ’im no good. The Irishwoman down below, she dreamt she seed ’im in a shroud, and, Doctor, I see meself as ’e gets thinner, and I believe me milk ’as got some poison in it, along of some oysters what I eat one Sunday, and so I see ’im gettin’ thinner, Doctor, and there’s the strangled look a-comin’ _now_! Won’t you give ’im somethink, Doctor? What did you say I was to take ’im to the breast for? I tell you my milk ’as got the microbes in it. Oh, Christ! what can a woman _do_? And Mine he comes ’ome late and stands and swears at me wiv no more feelin’ than a ’og. Me gran’father Murphy’s eyes ’e’s got. There, then, sonny; there, then. What’ll you do for ’im, Doctor? I seed a black cat on our winder-sill last night. My Gawd!—see ’ow it grips ’im!"