Sir Joseph Astill was proud, as well he might be, of the Medical School. “In this city,” he boasted, “there are actually more hospital beds _per centum_ of inhabitants than in any other in the whole country. The North Bromwich medical student has a greater opportunity of studying disease, in all its aspects, than the alumnus of any other school in the world. Thousands of beds lie waiting for his scrutiny; and I am glad to say that very few of them are ever empty.” Edwin’s first serious acquaintance with North Bromwich had begun at the end of the summer holidays, through which he had worked with a good deal less than the fiery enthusiasm that he would have put into his reading for the Balliol scholarship. The syllabus of the examination for the Astill Exhibition had amazed him by its simplicity: the prescribed books were works that he had absorbed some years before at St. Luke’s, and though the mathematical side of the business worried him, as it had always done, it was clear that in North Bromwich the classics were regarded really as a polite accomplishment rather than as an integral part of a gentleman’s equipment in life: so that these drowsy summer months were really a period of comparative idleness in which he had time to brood on his regrets and become gradually reconciled to his new fate. In this spirit he approached the examination. Even the capitoline eminence on which the university buildings were placed, with the tremendous renaissance buildings of the Council House and the Corinthian Town Hall, did not greatly impress him. He saw rather the squalid slums from which these pretentious buildings rose. It was so different, he thought, from Oxford, and he passed the flagged courtyard with its cool fountain and the benevolent statue of Sir Joseph Astill in a frock coat and carrying a rolled umbrella on which the sculptor had lavished all the feeling of his art, without the least shadow of spiritual obeisance. With two other long-legged candidates he had worked through his papers in a small room whose windows overlooked the quiet square and a phantom stream of noiseless traffic beyond. The first paper had been mathematical, and its intricacies kept his mind so busy that he had little time for reflection. From time to time he would see one of the long-legged competitors reducing the end of his penholder to wood-pulp in the earnestness of ruminant thought; and occasionally the deep boom of the clock in the tower of the Art Gallery would remind him that time was veritably passing; but time passed swiftly, and he was almost surprised to find himself once more in an air that for all its vitiation was less sleepy than that of the sealed examination room. By the end of the first evening all that he feared in the examination papers was over. To-morrow he would be on his own ground and the modern university could do its damnedest.