There's a time--fortunately brief--in the career of the just-qualified student when he is a little inclined to assert his professional supremacy. How tenderly she watches him through it; and how, telling him all things, she apparently tells him nothing! I wouldn't like to say how many years she has stood there, or what sights, humorous, tragic, unpaintably indecent, she has witnessed in all that time. And you could certainly never guess them for yourself. Let me only say then that her wisdom is more than the wisdom of many physicians, and that no gentler fingers have touched the seamy side of life. And yet, I suppose, she was once a little girl, shinning up the orchard trees for the apples at the top. And she can still, I believe, drop a sentimental tear or two upon the last page of a novel. So can this be yet another miracle that my hospital has wrought? Dear me--and we have got no further than the receiving-room, and scarcely even thought about the patients. Sometimes I wonder if the people whose pennies are invited to keep us for a second ever realise the full significance of the instant that they make their own. Not always, I think, for even I, who am in the hospital three times a week, only get an occasional vision of it--chiefly on such days as these, when one may travel its wards at large, unforbidden by professional etiquette. Do they know, for example, that under the roof of the out-patients' department there are two small boys--open-mouthed little snorers of yesterday, sprawling about on the pavement inviting trouble--whose tonsils during that moment have been successfully removed from them? And can they perceive, in the same measure of time, a dozen blocked-up ears and noses being skilfully examined by electrical illumination? Do they realise that, simultaneously with all this, eight short-sighted persons are being tested for spectacles, and two more being operated upon for squint; that three men with diseased skins are being prescribed for in another part of the building, and that four women who were being consumed with lupus are now being cured with light; that a poor servant-girl is under gas while her yet poorer teeth are being removed, and that three others are being fitted with nerveless new ones; that a little damsel with a dislocated hip is having it put in plaster; that an elderly and rheumatic cab-driver is being helped with radiant heat; and that some four hundred men and women of all descriptions are waiting their turn for treatment? My numbers are conservative; but, even so, does the gentleman on the underground railway platform realise (to be merely sordid) that during his second some five hundred pounds' worth of free operations are in progress? Does he visualise the resultant satisfaction in all those squalid little homes, the domestic relief, the returning efficiency, the rolled-away anxiety, the dawning happiness? And does he remember that he has as yet