And from this household he has to drive home by a private school where lies some boy with a cheerful countenance and a suspicious red rash on his chest. It would never do to create a false alarm. But, on the other hand, it would be more than disastrous to let the origin of some sweeping epidemic go free for convenience' sake. And here is a servant-maid in the surgery with a throat that looks as diphtheritic as a throat can well be; and she comes from a dairy farm that supplies half the town with milk, under the eyes of a government inspector; while the rector's wife, nervous, and uncomfortably near forty, is expecting her first, long-looked-for baby some time this afternoon. It may take a good man to remove successfully an adherent appendix or an obscure tumour of the brain, or to diagnose some out-of-the-way lesion of a heart valve. But such a man, after all, has spent the greater portion of his professional life in dealing with no other subjects but these. And it must surely require at least an equal equipment, after its own kind, to deal wisely and rapidly with such variously conflicting problems as I have just been describing. You are probably becoming a little bored by these commonplace remarks of mine. But they are the sort of truism that will generally bear an occasional reconsideration. And if I have a very private opinion, to which you cannot subscribe, that the really able general practitioner is perhaps the very best man in our ranks bar none, I am quite willing to concede this extra superiority if you will grant him at least an equal eminence to that of Sir Grosvenor le Draughte, as Mr. Russell has called him in one of his recent books. So go into your practice with a good heart. Your experience as a locum in Bristol and Shropshire will have prepared you for any little mortifications that may be in waiting during your first few months. You will be used to the disheartening fall of the countenance that greets the junior partner when his senior was expected. And you will accept with a grave countenance and an inward chuckle your knowledge of the extremely frank criticism that is likely to herald and succeed your first few visits. Even now there's a letter upon my desk from a disrespectful young lady who shall be nameless. A new curate has made his initial appearance in an Eastbourne drawing-room. "He shook hands just like a baby," she writes, "and he stopped to tea, and he sprawled all over the table, and he has quite nice eyes, but his mouth is just like cook's when she's having one of her windy spasums." And if sixteen can rise to heights like this, what about eighteen and twenty and twenty-two? Nor are curates, alas, the only legitimate prey. I wonder if there's a girls' school in your practice?