Three Christmases from now, however, and they will be sauntering here very much at their ease, waiting about with their house-physicians for the two o'clock arrival of their chiefs from Harley Street. The gold buttons will have disappeared, I think, by then, and the trousers will be modester in hue; while on the other hand that collar will be above suspicion, and you might search in vain for a trace of red corrosive. Both, too, will be dangling stethoscopes, and would like, if they were quite certain of the chairman, to be smoking a Virginian cigarette. In other words, they have deserted the college for the "house." They have become critics of the nursing staff, and their talk--not on Christmas Day, of course--is of _râles_ and _rhonchi_ and the merits of their respective H.P.'s. There are some of them standing about in the hall as our party dismounts from the carriage. But the majority are already in their favourite wards, whose walls they have been helping to decorate. Far removed are they from the Sawyers of yesterday, though at times they grow merry with wine. For the demands of examiners have become annually more stringent; their hospital duties are arduous; and hard work, as everybody knows, is the next-door neighbour to virtue. Give them but three Christmases more, and they will be even as this white-coated and dignified young man whom Horace and I are watching as he deals with the patients in the receiving-room. For these will drift in from the streets and tenements, whether or no the day be a Festival, and partly, perhaps, with an eye to possible good cheer. We wait a little, as he stands there by the pillar, a curious contrast, with his fresh face and athletic figure, to the slouching fleshiness of these big navvies and the stunted urbanity of the rest. Behind him stand a couple of dressers, fresh from the college, willing, but still perhaps a little bewildered, and to whom this all-knowing and self-possessed young surgeon is something of a god. His treatment is rapid--it has to be--for he is here primarily to sort out the cases that come crowding in their daily hundreds. But he must never make a mistake--a grave one, that is. And the remembrance of this has taught him--no easy matter--to know real illness when he sees it with a pretty high degree of certainty. So the bad cases he sets on one side. For if possible they must be admitted; and at any rate they must be seen by the house-surgeon or house-physician on duty. While as for the rest, they may be given at once the necessary pill, or a desirable draught from that decorated urn in the corner--there's a certain irony in that particular wreath of holly--or despatched, with out-patient cards, to appropriate special departments.