he would have prayed for her death. The sole deity he acknowledged was the one who only helps those who help themselves; and at times a dark thought occurred to him that some day he should be compelled to come to his own assistance—the methods of carrying out such an idea were all too easy and too safe for a man with his knowledge and in his position. CHAPTER XIX. AN APT PUPIL. Gentle friends, Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully; Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, Now hew him as a carcass fit for hounds. —_Shakespeare._ I hold that we should only affect compassion, and carefully avoid having any; it is a passion that is perfectly useless in a well-constituted mind, serving but to weaken the heart, and being only fit for common people, who, never acting by the rules of reason, are in want of passions to stimulate them to action.—_La Rochefoucauld._ Walter Mole was assistant to Mr. Crowe in his laboratory. He was twenty two years of age when he entered St. Bernard’s. He was the youngest son of a speculative builder in the West of England, who having made a fortune by erecting many streets of stucco-fronted villa residences (built on ground the gravel of which he had dug out and sold and replaced with the contents of the dust-bins of the town), was ambitious to settle his sons in life in the learned professions. He tried hard to make his eldest a clergyman, but as he lacked the ability even to conceal his evil habits, he sank back to the gutter from which it was impossible to raise him, and followed the entirely congenial calling of a billiard marker. The aspiring parent still determining to make capital out of evil and unpleasant things, sent his smart, pushing little cad of a son Walter to St. Bernard’s, to bring honour to the family name as a surgeon. Mr. Walter Mole was a very diminutive specimen of humanity, making up however in conceit, as is often the case, what he lacked in inches. Mr. Mole was a young man of aspirations. Sharp at his books, he had done so well at the cheap boarding school where he had got his education, that he had no difficulty in passing the examination in arts required by the very moderate ideas of the Apothecaries’ Society of London. By industry and a plodding perseverance, combined with an intense desire to elevate himself in the social ladder, he ingratiated himself in the favour of the Professor of Anatomy, who made him a “demonstrator,” a kind of anatomical pupil teacher. He won the scholarship in anatomy and physiology; by constant practice he acquired a nice dexterity with his fingers, and his dissections were so accurate and careful that many of them were honoured with places in the college museum. Now Mr. Mole, although popular with the lecturers, was detested by the men. He was,