Y OU will, perhaps, recall, my dear Brown one warm evening when you met me in the lounge of the Empire Theatre. I was with a thin, pasty-faced boy of nineteen in dinner-clothes, and with tuberculosis written plainly upon his countenance. You had just come back to London that day, after a month in Switzerland.

That night, I recollect, you chided me for ordering absinthe in the bar. I was highly amused. You believed, just as the world believed, that I was a staid and sober family-practitioner. Not so long ago such men as you and I wore coats of broad-cloth, like the family-lawyer, or the undertaker. Truly ours is a smug profession still, though we no longer affect the broadcloth and have exchanged the silk hat for the vulgar "bowler" of commerce.