The sister was a clever woman, a woman of ample means, and with great influence; why should not this be her life-work to found a new order of charity? It had been the work of many a noble woman to do greater things than this, and with apparently less foothold; and that night, before she went to rest, she prayed that strength and wisdom might be given to her to carry out the scheme which was taking hold upon her heart. “I shall want half a million of money to make a beginning. What is that? A man dies, and leaves a quarter of a million to a college of anatomy and surgery, to be spent in skeletons and pickled specimens of curious fish and odd deformities. Many a man’s picture gallery has had that spent upon it; it might buy a moderately good ironclad; would make a mile or two of suburban railway, and execute a few hundred yards of submarine tunnel. Somebody will come along who will see with me that humanity and cruelty, whom God hath disjoined eternally, shall not be forced into unholy union. Let me be the Joan of Arc to fight this out.” But not yet. She must arrange her plan of campaign, collect her forces. So enormous a task must demand an adequate inception, and though she shrank from nothing, she ventured nothing rashly. CHAPTER XXVIII. DR. STANFORTH WITH HIS PUPILS. His story would not have been worth one farthing if He had made the hat of him whom he represented one inch narrower.—_Steele._ Natural ferocity makes fewer cruel people than self love. —_La Rochefoucauld._ Dr. Stanforth knew everybody, from “a very exalted personage,” with whom he led the students to believe he was on terms of close intimacy, down to the most insignificant disciple of Galen who had ever been connected with the hospital. He never permitted a patient to baffle him; he always pretended that he knew all about him or her, and had his or her medical history at his fingers’ ends. His days in the out-patients’ rooms were looked forward to by the students with delight. He was so droll; he teased the pert and knowing patients worse than any Old Bailey barrister. “There was no getting over Stanforth,” they declared; “he was too much for the artfullest of ’em.” His _bete noir_ was the over-dressed, robust, viragoish lady patient, who could well afford to pay for medical advice, but wanted it for nothing. “Put out your tongue, madam.” The lady complied. Carefully adjusting his gold eye-glasses, he would minutely inspect it. “Did I understand you to say you were a strict teetotaler?” “No, sir, I am not exactly that: but it’s little I ever touch except a glass of beer with my dinner.” “_No_ spirits, madam?” “Very seldom, sir.” Dr. Stanforth would take off his glasses, carefully wipe them with his handkerchief, and readjust them.