from tuberculosis of the lungs, and was ordered to a warmer climate.

Selling his Dunchester practice for what it would fetch to his
assistant, Dr. Bell, my father came to Madeira--whither, I scarcely know
why, I have also drifted now that all is over for me--for here he hoped
to be able to earn a living by doctoring the English visitors. This,
however, he could not do, since the climate proved no match for his
disease, though he lingered for nearly two years, during which time he
spent all the money that he had. When he died there was scarcely enough
left to pay for his funeral in the little churchyard yonder that I can
see from the windows of this _quinta_. Where he lies exactly I do not
know as no record was kept, and the wooden cross, the only monument that
my mother could afford to set over him, has long ago rotted away.

Some charitable English people helped my mother to return to England,
where we went to live with her mother, who existed on a pension of about
120 pounds a year, in a fishing-village near Brighton. Here I grew up,
getting my education--a very good one by the way--at a cheap day school.
My mother's wish was that I should become a sailor like her own father,
who had been a captain in the Navy, but the necessary money was not
forthcoming to put me into the Royal Navy, and my liking for the sea was
not strong enough to take me into the merchant service.

From the beginning I wished to be a doctor like my father and
grandfather before me, for I knew that I was clever, and I knew also
that successful doctors make a great deal of money. Ground down as I
had been by poverty from babyhood, already at nineteen years of age
I desired money above everything on earth. I saw then, and subsequent
experience has only confirmed my views, that the world as it has become
under the pressure of high civilisation is a world for the rich. Leaving