Walking home along the cinder pathway beside the silting fish-ponds it seemed to him that in the light of his new experience, Halesby was a primitive and almost pitiable place, and the same mood held him when he made his way home by the short cut through Mrs. Barrow’s cloistered garden and entered his father’s house. Under the south wall the bed of double stocks was still in flower, though faded and bedraggled. Their scent reminded him of what a world of experience he had traversed in less than three months. He went straight up to his own bedroom. On the bed lay two parcels addressed to him. The larger contained his undergraduate’s cap and gown. He put them on in front of the glass and rather fancied himself. The act struck him as in a way symbolical: it was the token of an initiation. From that day forward he was a medical student. For five or six years, probably for the rest of his life, he would spend his time in the presence of the most bitter human experience; but there was something elevating in the thought that he need not be a helpless spectator: he would be able to effect positive good in a way that no scholar and no preacher of religion or abstract morality could possibly attain. “This is my life,” he thought. Well, it was good to know anything as definite as that. The second parcel contained a number of technical books dealing with the subjects of his first year’s curriculum: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Physiology, and Anatomy. The last appeared to be the most exciting. “Fearfully and wonderfully made . . .” he thought. He set to work at once preparing the little room for work, making it as comfortable as he could with a writing table in the window that looked out over Shenstone’s woods and dethroning the superannuated Henty and Fenn from the bookshelf. He could not find it in his heart to treat his poets so cavalierly, and so there they stayed. Greek and Latin and English. “I shall never drop my classics,” he thought. A resolution that has been forgotten nearly as often as it has been made. In the Blenheim orange-tree at the bottom of the garden a thrush was singing. Bullfinches were fighting shrilly in the raspberry canes. He threw open the window, and there ascended to him the heavy, faded perfume of the bed of stocks. On the mantelpiece stood a photograph of his mother. Looking at it, it seemed to him that she smiled. CHAPTER II MORTALITY BEHOLD . . . I