"It was not my idea at all. I got it from Shakespeare. Do you not recall a scene in 'Timon of Athens' where Timon invites his false friends to a banquet to show them up?" "Well, you worked it neatly, anyhow," said Parkin, who had never read Shakespeare in his life. "I had one great advantage over 'old Bill,'" continued Dr. Harford. "In what way?" asked Mrs. Parkin, smiling at him. "I had the phonograph." _The Night That Patti Sang_ When I moved there 10 years ago that Franklin-street block just west of Charles was even then known as "Doctors' Row," though there was by no means the number of professional men the street now has. From Dr. Osler's at the Charles-street corner of the south side--in the old Colonial mansion where now the Rochambeau apartments stand--to Dr. Alan P. Smith's on the north side next to the old Maryland Club building at Cathedral street, there were in all five doctors. And my own shingle--newly painted in gilt letters as befitted a specialist freshly returned from the Vienna hospitals--made the sixth sign of the kind. On the south side not far from Dr. Osler's, the front of one of those fine old houses erected in the thirties, and the homes of the elite of Baltimore for many years before Mount Vernon place was built up, bore the announcement of: _____________________________ | | | JAMES COURSEY DUNTON, M. D. | |_____________________________| The sign was of a very old pattern, and was so rain-washed that the name could scarcely be deciphered. This, too, was the case with a frosted pane in the front window, on which--perhaps 40 years ago--Dr. Dunton had had his name painted in black letters. The house, too, showed the same lack of paint and care. In my student days at the Johns Hopkins Medical School I had never heard the name of Dr. Dunton, and this led me to make inquiries of a professional neighbor. I learned that Dunton was in effect an elderly hermit, that for years he had abandoned his practice and had declined to respond to calls. His self-enforced isolation had grown to such a degree that he was rarely seen on the street and made all his household purchases through notes stuck in his vestibule door for "order boys". "I have seen Dunton only once in eight years," said my informant. "They say, too, he used to be an excellent practitioner, an Edinburgh graduate, with a patronage of the best classes--a courtly gentleman who was well liked by his patients." "What was the cause for the change?" I asked. "A love tragedy of some kind, they told me, though I never got the details."