The locality was Chicago. The date Saturday, May 4th, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and eighty-nine. The time eight o'clock of the evening. Philip Patrick Henry Cronin--for this was the full name of the physician--was closeted with a patient in the most spacious of the front suite of rooms attached to a handsomely furnished flat directly over the Windsor Theatre on North Clark Street. The tenants of the flat, T. T. Conklin, a well-known saloon keeper, and his wife, were among his most intimate and confidential friends, and with them the physician, who was a confirmed bachelor, had resided so long that he was regarded, to all intents and purposes, as one of the family. They nursed him in sickness, studied his every requirement when in health, and in a great measure, shared with him his personal and political knowledge. It was a happy, congenial family in every sense of the term. Dr. Cronin was on the point of dismissing the patient, for an important meeting of the Celto-American Society, which published a paper of which he was the political editor, necessitated his hurrying away to the other side of the city, when the door-bell rang violently. Mrs. Conklin responded. A man pale and breathless, stood on the landing. [Illustration: DR. CRONIN'S APARTMENTS IN WINDSOR THEATRE BUILDING.] "Is Dr. Cronin in?" he demanded, in a hurried, nervous manner. "Yes," was the reply, "but he is busy with a patient." "Well," responded the stranger with increasing nervousness. "I want to see him. It is a matter of life or death." Some fragments of the conversation had penetrated to the office where the physician was giving a final injunction to his patient. He threw open the door and came out into the vestibule. "What is the matter?" he asked. "Doctor" said the strange visitor as he presented a card, "one of the workmen at P. O'Sullivan's ice house at Lake View, has met with an accident and been terribly injured about here" (indicating the abdomen by a wave of his hand). "Unless a doctor sees him at once," he went on in his hurried, nervous, manner, "he will die. O'Sullivan is out of town, but he has spoken so often of you and said that you should be called in case of an accident that I thought I'd better come to you." Dr. Cronin glanced at the card. It was a fac-simile of this. [Illustration] For a moment he twirled it between his finger and thumb. Then he looked at his watch. It was near the hour for the meeting, in the proceedings of which he was liable to take a prominent part. But the humane instincts of the profession quickly overcame all other considerations. "One moment" he ejaculated, "and I will be with you." "I have a buggy and fast horse down stairs" called out the stranger.