Did a member of the staff invent a new bed, a new inhaler, a new instrument, or a new kind of invalid’s clothing, it must be purchased, no matter what the cost, as often as he chose to order it for his patients. It served to keep his name before the public; it was one of the many ways in which the charity could recompense him for the time he devoted to its work. A bookseller once declared, if his customers only purchased the books they were likely to read, he would not get bread and cheese. If only the pharmaceutical preparations were purchased which the patients really required, the makers of them would be in the same predicament. It is so easy to be liberal when you don’t have to pay. With proper conscientious management, directed for the patient’s benefit alone, the expenses of our great hospitals might easily be reduced one-half. But then there must be a good deal of self-sacrifice. CHAPTER XVI. SOWING WILD OATS. The acquirements of science may be termed the armour of the mind; but that armour would be worse than useless that cost us all we had, and left us nothing to defend.—_Lacon._ We go our ways With something you o’erlooked, forgot, or chose to sweep Clean out of door; our pearl picked from your rubbish-heap. You care not for your loss; we calculate our gain. —_Browning._ Our doctor was now given wholly to the material side of his work. Young men are an imitative order of beings, loving smartness, and desiring to be in the foremost rank, whether in sports or study. The men of the hospital found there was no road to distinction at St. Bernard’s except that of novelty. There was nothing to be done on the old lines; to stay there was to be content with the dead level of mediocrity. This section of the school scoffed at religion, held faith to be a mark of imperfect development; and in proportion as they grew more in the sort of knowledge they thought it the proper thing to acquire, learned to despise everything which of old had served to make the world wise and good. Elsworth, for some time, kept himself aloof from this set, but his abilities and his rising ambition made him a man to be competed for and flattered. Gradually he became puffed up with a sense of the importance of the things he had acquired. So far from thinking himself, with Newton, a child on the sea-shore picking up shells of truth, he fancied he was doing business in the deep waters, though he was only stumbling amongst rocks. When this state of mind is reached, the man becomes selfish and indifferent to the condition of his fellow-men, and as God becomes a vanishing point Self looms large. All the virtues were to these men mere conventionalities, and it was as absurd not to live for one’s own advancement as for a giraffe to contravene the law of his