"I'll show yer," he cried. "You begins just in front o' the ear and makes a round spot, and then yer goes on right down the cheek and along yer chin, just as if you was trying to paint whiskers. Let me do it, Miss." Rich hesitated for a moment, and then sat down and held her face on one side, while the boy carefully painted the place with the tincture, frowning the while and balancing himself upon the tips of his toes. "Stop a moment, Miss," cried Bob. "Then he dropped two drops out o' this here blue bottle on a bit o' glass, and finished off with it just as you does with gum when you paint a picture." Rich watched the boy anxiously as he took down a bottle labelled "Chloroform," but smiled and submitted patiently as the painting operation was completed. "Feel better, Miss?" said the boy. "Not yet, Bob; but I daresay this will do it good. Now put back those bottles, and don't meddle with them, mind." "As if I didn't know, Miss! Why, I'm up to all the doctor's dodges now. There ain't a bottle on any o' them shelves I ain't smelled; and look at them things in sperrits," he continued, pointing to the various preparations standing upon one shelf, the relics of the doctor's lecturing days. "I knows 'em all by heart. I had to fill 'em with fresh sperrit once." Rich turned and smiled at the boy as she reached the door; and then once more the young student was left alone, to go and peep through the keyhole to see if the doctor was fast asleep, and this being so, he ran to the door by the street, turned suddenly with his head on one side, raised his hands with the helpless, appealing gesture of the sick, and walked feebly to the cushioned chest, upon which he sank, with a low moan. It was a clever piece of acting, studied from nature, and sinking back, he lay for a moment or two sufficiently long for the supposed patient to compose himself, before he assumed another part. Leaping up, he went on tiptoe to the consulting-room again, peeped to see that all was right, and then, drawing himself up exactly as he had seen the doctor act scores of times, he slowly approached the settee, his face full of smiling interest, and sitting down in a chair beside the imaginary patient, he went through a magnificent piece of pantomime--so good that it was a pity there was no audience present to admire. For Bob had taken the doctor's glasses from the chimney-piece, put them on, and bent over the patient. "Put out your tongue," he said. "Hum--ha! yes! a little foul." Then he felt an imaginary pulse, his head on one side, and an imaginary watch in his hand. "That will do," he said, returning the imaginary watch to its airy fob. "Now sit up." Bob's ear was applied for a few moments to the phantom patient's chest. "Breathe hard. That's it. Now more fully. Yes. Now a very long breath." So real was the proceeding that a spectator would have filled up the void in his mind as Bob changed his position, holding his head now at the patient's back.