Yet the afternoon did contain one of those disquieting surprises that used at one time to seem so catastrophic, and now appear only too wonderfully uncommon. For some weeks past I have had a poor fellow in one of my beds, a cheerful soul, for all he knew himself to be treading a downhill road. His condition, rather an obscure one, and in any event incurable, might have represented one of two causes. Week by week, to a respectful and intelligent body of students, I have demonstrated the signs and symptoms of this patient, and proved to them how, on the whole, they must be taken to indicate B--shall we say?--as the root of the mischief. And now to-day, before an expectant gathering, the uncompromising knife of the pathologist in the post-mortem room has revealed the precisely opposite. It was A all the time, and there was nothing for it but to accept defeat, and retire strategically in as good an order as might be. There was, at any rate, the consolation that the mistake could not have affected the unhappy issue of the malady. It was merely a sort of academic pride that was to suffer; and I suppose it is only an acquired familiarity with death that could have made so small a personal disaster even imaginable--for I don't think it ever really became actual--under its great shadow. So I made my retreat--in fair order, I believe, with baggage intact and a minimum of casualties. Nevertheless I caught young Martyn, the wing three, you know--what wouldn't I have given for his swerve thirty years ago!--smiling significantly across at your son, who was very tactfully endeavouring to appear oblivious. And it was Applebrook that fortified my powers of forgiveness--Applebrook rippling peacefully over its immemorial granite. And so there's plenty of water, is there, and the colour has been just right? And you have already been into a pounder, and landed him too. That's good, for though we miss a lot of pounders in Applebrook--"a pound, sir, if it weighed an ounce, and took half the cast away with it"--we seldom land one. And am I game to come down on May 1st as usual? A day-dream, or dusk-dream, has been interrupted here--I might have prophesied it--by one of those earnest, cadaverous persons whose pride it is that they have never taken--never felt the need of it, they usually add--a holiday in their lives. "Not for thirty-five years, sir," said this latest specimen to me just now, rubbing his hands with counting-house pride. "God help you," I replied, which took him aback a little, and was not, I admit, a tactful welcome to a prospective two guineas. But then, you see, he had fetched me back from a dusk-dream.