neighbourhood could venture abroad with less danger of being pressed for service at St. Bernard’s, and the porters had to go to Seven Dials for their purchases. These porters were characters in their way. Long service in this line of business had left its marks upon them. They were scarred and furrowed about the hands and arms with bites, cuts, and scratches, which had healed badly, and, to the skilled observer, sufficiently stamped them with the trade mark of the hospital. They were brutalized by their ghoul-like work, and, if given the opportunity of doing a stroke of business, would stick at nothing in the way of subjects, which did not actually jeopardize their necks. Mr. Crowe was forty-two years old, of middle height, dark, and inclined to leanness. He had a decidedly malevolent aspect. His face was not that of the libertine, the schemer, or the man of pleasure; but a perfect pitilessness, an utter dissociation from any genial or loving characteristics, was boldly recorded on the lines of his face, and the very carriage of his body. Hard was not the word for it, cruel was not wide enough to comprehend his character. Disregard of all pain in others, contempt for those who professed to care for what troubled others; these were the distinguishing traits of Mr. Malthus Crowe’s moral character, and his face advertised it. Mr Crowe was rapidly becoming an authority in his branches of science, and accordingly brought much kudos to St. Bernard’s. Had not physiology been invented in these latter days, it is difficult to imagine what the world could have done for Mr. Crowe. He loved pain; he reverenced and esteemed it (in others, of course). He had inflicted it in every form, and watched its effects learnedly without flinching, both in animals and man. He always described it as a tonic—Nature’s great nerve bracer—but he never took it himself if he could help it. He declared the world could not get on without it. He had married in early life the daughter of an Italian engineer, who lived at Cernobbio, on Lake Como. Having been in the habit of taking his long vacation tour in Switzerland and Italy, he had formed the acquaintance of several hospital surgeons of kindred tastes to his own, and had frequently visited them at Milan and Genoa, and compared notes on matters of mutual interest. One of these _confrères_ had introduced him to his family, and so he met Olympia Casatelli, and, having some reason to think her prospects good, had married her, notwithstanding she was a Catholic, though her pronounced Garibaldian sentiments had left her without any very ardent attachment to the religion of her baptism.