"Oh, he remembered me, all right," said the Doctor. "Quite in the same vein, too, only he's not so complimentary. He calls me 'The Humane Surgeon,' and runs into rhyme after this fashion: "O, Doctor Blank's a surgeon bold, A surgeon most humane, sir; And what he does is e'er devoid Of ordinary pain, sir. "If he were called to amputate A leg hurt by a bullet, He wouldn't take a knife and cut-- But with his bill he'd pull it." "He must have had some experience with you, Doctor," said the Idiot. "In fact, he knows you so well that I am inclined to think that the writer of that valentine lives in this house, and it is just possible that the culprit is seated at this table at this moment." "I think it very likely," said the Doctor, dryly. "He's a fresh young man, five feet ten inches in height--" "Pooh--pooh!" said the Idiot. "That's the worst description of Mr. Brief I ever heard. Mr. Brief, in the first place, is not a young man, and he isn't fresh--" "I didn't mean Mr. Brief," said the Doctor, significantly. "Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself to intimate that Mr. Whitechoker, a clergyman, would stoop to the writing of such a rhyme as that," cried the Idiot. "People nowadays seem to me to be utterly lacking in that respect for the cloth to which it is entitled. Mr. Brief, if you really wrote that thing you owe it to Mr. Whitechoker to own up and thus relieve him of the suspicion the Doctor has so unblushingly cast upon him." "I can prove an alibi," said the Lawyer. "I could no more turn a rhyme than I could play 'Parsifal' on a piano with one finger, and I wouldn't if I could. I judge, from what I know of the market value of poems these days, that that valentine of the Doctor's is worth about two dollars. It would take me a century to write it, and inasmuch as my time is worth at least five dollars a year it stands to reason that I would not put in five hundred dollars' worth of effort on a two-dollar job. So that lets me out. By-the-way, I got one of these trifles myself. Want to hear it?" "I am just crazy to hear it," said the Idiot. "If any man has reduced you to poetry, Mr. Brief, he's a great man. With all your many virtues, you seem to me to fit into a poetical theme about as snugly as an automobile with full power on in a china-shop. By all means let us have it." "This modern St. Valentine of ours has reduced the profession to verse with a nicety that elicits my most profound admiration," said Mr. Brief. "Just listen to this: "The Lawyer is no wooer, yet To sue us is his whim. The Lawyer is no tailor, but We get our suits from him. The longest things in all the world-- They are the Lawyer's briefs, And all the joys he gets in life Are other people's griefs. Yet spite of all the Lawyer's faults He's one point rather nice: He'll not remain lest you retain And _never gives_ advice."