it as a huge and rather ludicrous experiment. The
germ theory of disease set him chuckling for a long
time, and his favourite joke in the sick room was to
say, "Shut the door or the germs will be getting in."
As to the Darwinian theory, it struck him as being
the crowning joke of the century. "The children in
the nursery and the ancestors in the stable," he
would cry, and laugh the tears out of his eyes.

He is so very much behind the day that
occasionally, as things move round in their usual
circle, he finds himself, to his bewilderment, in the
front of the fashion. Dietetic treatment, for
example, had been much in vogue in his youth, and
he has more practical knowledge of it than any one
whom I have met. Massage, too, was familiar to him
when it was new to our generation. He had been
trained also at a time when instruments were in a
rudimentary state, and when men learned to trust more
to their own fingers. He has a model surgical hand,
muscular in the palm, tapering in the fingers, "with
an eye at the end of each." I shall not easily
forget how Dr. Patterson and I cut Sir John Sirwell,
the County Member, and were unable to find the stone.
It was a horrible moment. Both our careers were at
stake. And then it was that Dr. Winter, whom we had
asked out of courtesy to be present, introduced into
the wound a finger which seemed to our excited senses
to be about nine inches long, and hooked out the
stone at the end of it. "It's always well to bring