“Going to heal up your leg, old chap, in a brace of shakes. Splendid invention for putting a new skin on your leg. Sha’n’t hurt you a bit. Don’t squeal. I’m just going to snip off a tiny bit or two from your arm, and transplant ’em on to your leg.” And having cheered up the patient with a stiff glass of grog which the nurse had at command, the vigorous young dresser took off a dozen or more pieces of skin the size of a threepenny-piece, from the arms, and scattered them in likely places on the badly healing burn. When Mr. Murphy entered the dining-room that night, he was received with a perfect roar of laughter from the house surgeons, who had become aware of the ignorant barbarity the burnt man had suffered; and Mr. Murphy was made to know that his idea of a snip of skin for grafting was at least a hundred times in excess of what it ought to be, and that for the future he must be less generous with his pound of flesh. Even the patient found out the error, and Murphy, who was a good-hearted fellow, wished he had known more about skin-grafting before he had punished him so. It was some weeks ere the victims arms healed, and the scars remain now, and even the operator is still sore when the subject is referred to. It was wonderful how they managed to get the patients to take all the new remedies that were tested upon them. Folks are usually very careful as to the physic they swallow. Your poor folk do not mind it being nasty, they rather like it thick, with a good rich, nourishing sediment and an awakening odour; but they are very suspicious of anything that gives them queer sensations. They often return to their doctor with a bottle of stuff which he has prescribed them, and declare that they “cannot take any more of it, because the first dose made them feel as if all their senses was a-running away from them down their right arm, making them feel that strange in their toes as they seemed as if they wore going to die.” And this when the poor practitioner has merely given them perhaps a little quinine, or some simple diffusible stimulant! Their confidence seems to come with the increase in the number of their medical attendants; and when the chief surgeon, with his dozen of satellites, supported by several capable-looking nurses, has ordered them to take a decoction that works in their systems as if scorpions and tarantella spiders were careering through their veins, they submit with meekest resignation, and admire the regularity with which their doses are timed. You can do things in hospital it would be as much as your life were worth to attempt outside. A hospital doctor may steal the horse where a general practitioner dare not look over the hedge. “It’s the confidence as does it,” Mrs. Podger used to say. But not always. Some do resent. The spread of Socialism, the tracts of the various societies which dare to question some of the cherished privileges of the profession, and the general uprising against all