And now let me round off my epistle with a brief reminiscence. In my early twenties, just after I had qualified, I travelled down to a small fishing-village in Cornwall to act there as locum tenens for a practitioner who had finally broken down in health. The practice, mostly among a poor population, was a scattered one, and I was kept fairly busy; so busy, in fact, that beyond a hazy impression of buffeting across estuaries in big-bottomed ferryboats, and driving, upon a wild night or two, along as rough a coast-line as one could desire to see, I remember very little of that month's experiences. One remains with me. And you must imagine a rather tumble-down, twopenny-halfpenny cottage, half-way down a cobbled street, with its front door opening directly into a tiny living-room. A youthful-looking Hippocrates is backing out of it rather more awkwardly than usual. And in front of him, still holding one of his hands, is a willowy, comely Cornish lass, mother of three, with the most disturbingly moist-looking eyes. In the background there would be, I think, a very old and rugged woman, crooning over her youngest grandchild, just recovered, happily, and rather miraculously, from a very tough attack of pneumonia. The young man had been telling them, this simple family, that he was going away now, back to London and the big hospital. And hence--dare I write it?--hence these tears. "Ah, doctor," says the lassie, "'tis wisht you've made us. An' whatever'll us do now if the little uns take bad?" "Oh, rot," says the blushing physician, jolted for the moment out of a rather elaborate bedside manner--"nonsense, I mean. You'll get along all right. There's another man coming. And I didn't do anything, you know, really." "Didn't do nothen? D'you hear that, mother?" And the old woman looks up, with her wrinkled cheeks and cavernous, sea-blue eyes. "D'you think us don't know very well as you've saved the poor lamb's life?" And so, as Pepys would say, into the wet, bright street, and up the hill to the surgery. She was under a misapprehension, of course. Presently, if you take up medicine, you will learn that a doctor's part in the treatment of pneumonia consists chiefly of a masterly inactivity. But a boy of twenty-four can't hear words like that spoken to him, and remain quite the same person; even if next week he is busy bashing hats in at a Hospital Cup-tie. By the way, I got mine rather badly damaged last Wednesday when Guy's won the cup again. And, I think, now you have read this letter, that I can almost hear you murmuring, "No wonder." Your affect. father, P. H. III _To Miss Josephine Summers, The Cottage, Potham, Beds._ 91B HARLEY STREET, W., _March_ 14, 1910. MY DEAR AUNT JOSEPHINE,