which they were accustomed from their college days. For instance
Bastin was always talking about the early Christians and
missionaries, while Bickley loathed both, the early Christians
because of the destruction which they had wrought in Egypt,
Italy, Greece and elsewhere, of all that was beautiful; and the
missionaries because, as he said, they were degrading and
spoiling the native races and by inducing them to wear clothes,
rendering them liable to disease. Bastin would answer that their
souls were more important than their bodies, to which Bickley
replied that as there was no such thing as a soul except in the
stupid imagination of priests, he differed entirely on the point.
As it was quite impossible for either to convince the other,
there the conversation would end, or drift into something in
which they were mutually interested, such as natural history and
the hygiene of the neighbourhood.

Here I may state that Bickley's keen professional eye was not
mistaken when he diagnosed Mrs. Bastin's state of health as
dangerous. As a matter of fact she was suffering from heart
disease that a doctor can often recognise by the colour of the
lips, etc., which brought about her death under the following
circumstances:

Her husband attended some ecclesiastical function at a town
over twenty miles away and was to have returned by a train which
would have brought him home about five o'clock. As he did not
arrive she waited at the station for him until the last train
came in about seven o'clock--without the beloved Basil. Then, on
a winter's night she tore up to the Priory and begged me to lend
her a dog-cart in which to drive to the said town to look for