The bullet-headed Irishman who was driving the ambulance as skilfully as became the former owner of a night-hawk cab glanced back at the doctor and sized up the situation. "There's no knowin' what it is we'll find when we get there," he began. "There's times when it's no aisy job the doctor has. Say you give the man ether, now, or whatever it is you make him sniff, and maybe he's dead when he comes out of it. Where are you then?" The young man decided instantly that if anything of that sort should happen to him that afternoon, he would go back to Georgia at once and try for a place in the country store. "But nothing ever fazed Dr. Chandler," the driver went on. "It's Dr. Chandler's place you're takin' now, ye know that?" It seemed to the surgeon that the Irishman was making ready to patronize him, or at least to insinuate the new-comer's inferiority to his predecessor, whereupon his sense of humor came to his rescue, and a smile relieved the tension of his nerves as he declared that Dr. Chandler was an honor to his profession. "He is that!" the driver returned, emphatically, as with a dextrous jerk he swung the ambulance just in front of a cable-car, to the sputtering disgust of the gripman. "An' it's many a dangerous case we've had to handle together, him and me." "I don't doubt that you were of great assistance," the young Southerner suggested. "Many's the time he's tould me he never knew what he'd ha' done without me," the Irishman responded. "There was that night, now--the night when the big sailor come off the Roosian ship up in the North River there, an' he got full, an' he fell down the steps of a barber shop, an' he bruck his leg into three paces, so he did; an' that made him mad, the pain of it, an' he was just wild when the ambulance come. Oh, it was a lovely jag he had on him, that Roosian--a lovely jag! An' it was a daisy scrap we had wid him!" "What did he do?" asked the surgeon. "What didn't he do?" the driver replied, laughing at the memory of the scene. "He tried to do the doctor--Dr. Chandler it was, as I tould you. He'd a big knife--it's mortial long knives, too, them Roosians carry--an' he was so full he thought it was Dr. Chandler that was hurtin' him, and he med offer to put his knife in him, when, begorra, I kicked it out of his hand." "I have often heard Dr. Chandler speak of you," said the doctor, with an involuntary smile, as he recalled several of the good stories that his predecessor had told him of the driver's peculiarities. "An' why w'u'dn't he?" the Irishman replied. "It's more nor wanst I had to help him out of trouble. An' never a worrd we had in all the months he drove out wid me. But it 'll be some aisy little job we'll have now, I'm thinkin'--a sun-stroke, maybe, or a kid that's got knocked down by a scorcher, or a thrifle of that kind; you'll be able to attend to that yourself aisy enough, no doubt."