But now "a change came o'er the spirit of his dream." The career which opened before the young surgeon was full of promise. So far as the personal factor was concerned, no man could have started with a better equipment. There were efficiency, thoroughness, enthusiasm, courage, and common-sense; there were, as we have seen in the student days, manual dexterity and exactness and artistic power of no contemptible order; there was, in short, every attribute of an accomplished surgeon, who must in the course of nature rise to eminence. A chair of military surgery was ready for him at King's College, and an assistant-surgeonship at Westminster Hospital. All that, however, had to be sacrificed and a new departure taken, in consequence of an illness which left its mark in the form of paralysis of hands and arms, and thus put an end to "all dreams of surgical practice." This malady was a legacy from the Peninsula. Like Cæsar, "he had a fever when he was in Spain," a rheumatic fever of a particularly severe type contracted at the siege of San Sebastian. This entailed indescribable pain and misery during many months, and, in spite of partial recoveries, seems to have left its after-effects seven years later in what he calls the "mysterious" affection in his hands. It was indeed considered remarkable that he should have survived an attack of so formidable a character. He never recovered the use of his thumbs, which marred the legibility of his writing to the end of his life. His professional career being thus rudely closed, it might well have appeared to a man of thirty-five that his life was shipwrecked ere the voyage was well begun. It would have been in accord with the short-sighted judgment which men usually form of their own fortunes. But "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will;"-- and Alcock learned, what many before and since have learned, that prosperity and adversity oft visit men in disguise, and are liable to be mistaken the one for the other. Providence employs for its favourites an alchemy whereby the very ashes of their misery may be transmuted into pure gold; and what looks like disaster is but the rending of the veil which concealed a world of richer promise than that which they abandon with regret. [Illustration] FOOTNOTES: [1] He dropped the "John" so early in life that he was never known by it. [2] The only valuable consideration he received for these labours was bestowed some years later, when his entry into the service of the Foreign Office was ante-dated to 1840, so as to include the period of the Peninsular commissions. CHAPTER II. SENT TO CHINA.