To Dr. Stanforth, Mr. Crowe’s easy-going, amiable colleague, as we have said, the case presented no peculiar features whatever. Very few cases did so to this optimistic, complacent gentleman. His was the charity that thinketh no evil, and considered everything was “for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” Perhaps, however, it was the _nil admirari_ principle that most influenced him. He had acquired a certain distinction in his profession by having statistics ready for every class of case coming under his notice in his speciality, and it would have detracted from his glory to have permitted himself to be surprised at anything which might happen to a lady patient. “Had he ever seen such a case before?” some excited general practitioner who thought he had something interesting to show him would demand, only to be coolly set down with the reply, “Oh, certainly. As near as I can tell without reference to my notes, this makes the thirteenth case of the kind that I have examined since my connection with the hospital.” When, therefore, Dr. Stanforth had heard all the symptoms exhibited by Mrs. Crowe on the morning of her decease, he was not the least surprised; he had his theory ready for any emergency. “Ah, my dear Crowe, this is just what I always expected would happen to your poor wife. In cases of cirrhosis like hers, find the proportion of deaths, with just such symptoms as you describe, to be one in 238-1/3.” Dr. Stanforth prided himself in his arithmetic, in which he was always very exact. He usually went in for decimals, but to-day was satisfied with vulgar fractions. He always had a similar case to illustrate the one under notice, and was equally precise in his way of mentioning it. “I had just such another case in the year 1861. It was Easter Monday, and I remember it was snowing hard. I was called to a draper’s in St. John’s Wood. You know the shop opposite the church? Just such a case as this. The poor heart-broken husband, just like yourself, was beside himself with grief, and reproached himself for having given his wife, poor thing, some macaroni he had just got from Naples. She was seized precisely as Mrs. Crowe, and died within two hours after eating it. He would have it there were cholera germs in the macaroni. The cholera was raging in Naples just then. You remember. Don’t you remember? Ah, I do! I lost my beautiful cousin, Lady Arethusa Standoph, who was seized with it while staying at Castellamare close by. One in every 625-1/4 visitors to Naples died that year of cholera, of all nationalities that is to say; of English only one in every 889-1/2.”