That was the position. The thought of making the Infirmary his hiding-place came to him as an inspiration. In Greenside he caught a ’bus which took him up to the head of Infirmary Street for a penny. He just managed to get within the gate of the Infirmary when he was seized with such a paroxysm of his trouble that he dropped almost insensible at the feet of the janitor. The house surgeon was summoned, and, as Tommy was then too far gone to be removed with safety to his home, he was borne in an invalid’s chair to the nearest ward, and there put to bed. Close to the head of this bed, and below the sash of one of the windows, was a little shelved cupboard, in which was stowed some of the other patients’ clothing—tied up in bundles till they should be needed again. Tommy’s agony was never so bad but that he could look after the folding up of his clothes, and more especially his trousers, in the pocket of which now reposed a gold chronometer worth at least £60. Such tender solicitude did he evince for the safety of these worn and shabby articles that the attention of more than one person was attracted, and the surgeon sharply demanded whether he had not any tobacco concealed about the pockets, to which Tommy gaspingly replied that he never used tobacco or snuff—a pathetic lie. As soon as the clothes were bundled up and put away in the little cupboard, Tommy had a relapse which occupied the surgeon and nurses for an hour at least, and effectually banished from their minds all remembrance of the little incident of the clothes. Next forenoon, when the time arrived for the professors and students to make their round, it was found that Tommy’s trouble had all settled in his back and neck, for in the one he had such dreadful pains that he could scarcely lie in bed, and in the other a chronic stiffness which a year or two’s rheumatism could hardly have equalled. There was much grave consultation around his bed, and Tommy tried hard to learn the result of the deliberations, for he had a wholesome dread of being scarified on the nape of the neck with hot irons, or cupped on the shoulders, as he had been in the prison hospital for a similar attack, but all that passed was spoken in whispers, and sometimes in a language which Tommy did not understand.