The thought of you is like
a good staff in my right hand.
The unexpected has happened so continually in my life
that it has ceased to deserve the name. You remember
that in my last I had received my dismissal, and was on
the eve of starting for the little country town of
Stockwell to see if there were any sign of a possible
practice there. Well, in the morning, before I came down
to breakfast, I was putting one or two things into a bag,
when there came a timid knock at my door, and there
was Mrs. Cullingworth in her dressing-jacket, with her
hair down her back.
"Would you mind coming down and seeing James, Dr.
Munro?" said she. "He has been very strange all night,
and I am afraid that he is ill."
Down I went, and found Cullingworth looking rather
red in the face, and a trifle wild about the eyes. He
was sitting up in bed, with the neck of his nightgown
open, and an acute angle of hairy chest exposed. He had
a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a clinical thermometer
upon the coverlet in front of him.
"Deuced interesting thing, Munro," said he. "Come
and look at this temperature chart. I've been taking it
every quarter of an hour since I couldn't sleep, and it's
up and down till it looks like the mountains in the
geography books. We'll have some drugs in--eh, what,
Munro?--and by Crums, we'll revolutionise all their ideas
about fevers. I'll write a pamphlet from personal
experiment that will make all their books clean out of
date, and they'll have to tear them up and wrap
sandwiches in them.
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