Dr. Beswick of East Seventeenth street was a man from the country, still under thirty, who had managed to earn money enough to get through the College of Physicians and Surgeons by working as a school-teacher between times. Ambitious as such self-lifted country fellows are apt to be, he had preferred to engage in the harsh competition of the metropolis in hope of one day achieving professional distinction. To a poor man the first necessity is an immediate livelihood. Such favorite cross-streets of the doctors as Thirty-fourth, and the yet more fashionable doctor-haunted up-and-down thoroughfares, were for long years to come far beyond the reach of a man without money or social backing, though Beswick saw visions of a future. He had planted himself in Mackerelville, where the people must get their medical advice cheap, and where a young doctor might therefore make a beginning. The sweetheart of his youth had entered the Training School for Nurses just when he had set out to study medicine. They two had waited long, but she had saved a few dollars, and at the end of his second year in practice, his income having reached a precarious probability of five hundred a year, they had married and set up office and house together in two rooms and a dark closet. There were advantages in this condensed arrangement, since the new Mrs. Beswick could enjoy the husband for whom she had waited so long and faithfully, by sitting on the lounge in the office whenever she had sedentary employment--the same lounge that was opened out at night into a bed. Both of the Beswicks were inured to small and hard quarters, and even these they had been obliged to share with strangers; since, therefore, they must lead a kind of camp life in the crowded metropolis they found it delightful to season their perpetual picnic with each other's society. And, moreover, two rooms for two people seemed by comparison a luxury of expansion. When youth and love go into partnership they feel no hardships, and for the present the most renowned doctor in Madison Avenue was probably something less than half as happy as these two lovers living in a cubbyhole with all the world before them, though but precious little of it within their reach beyond two well-worn trunks, three chairs, a table, and a bedstead lounge.