The Corner of Harley Street / Being Some Familiar Correspondence of Peter Harding, M.D.

, M.R.C.S., Ap

ley Str

h 4,

ear

e for this. You might even detect a little pathos, perhaps, in the chief of these. For I can't help feeling that a younger man-myself, for example, twenty years ago-would have been into it before you could say scalpel, snatching his joy as one of your own parr will take a Wickham on a cle

if mature, forefinger. I even ignored the twinkle in my wife's eye, and the more imper

y coffee with that inscrutable calm so justly associa

nd Claire, all chestnut mop and black-stockinged legs (and convalescent, by the way, from the mum

its stolen sweets from our own and our neighbours' hyacinths. And in a welcome sunshi

m," proceeded Molly. "Oh, who would

xcitement is to be deprecated. No

ly, adding, with very grea

murmured Claire from he

earnest political discussion, I begged them to resume this. For in making the breakfast-table their judgment-bar they were setting an example, as I reminded them, that the world would do well to follow. Breakfast-table verdicts, breakfast-table sermons, breakfast-table laws, for true and kindly sanity they might be safely backed, I ob

after which there was quite obviously nothing else to be done. Applebrook-glorious postmark-it had already begun to we

rtance," I annou

ed Molly, well int

se my wisdom kept it at a distance until just now. Applebrook-as I emerged from the District Railway into that faint but inexorable smell of burnt coffee and human unwashedness which broods over Whitechapel Road, the extra bulge in my breast-pocket reminded me suddenly of wind-blown gorse and all the hard-bitten, sunburnt heath that stands for Dartmoor. My step quickened. I entered the hospital gates

taken to indicate B-shall we say?-as the root of the mischief. And now to-day, before an expectant gathering, the uncompromising knife of the pathologist in the post-mortem room has revealed the precisely opposite. It was A all the time, and there was nothing for it but to accept defeat, and retire strategically in as good an order as might be. There was, at any rate, the consolation that the mistake could not have affected the unhappy issue of the malady. It was merely a sort of academic pride that was to suffer; and I suppose it is only an acquired familiarity with de

der, and landed him too. That's good, for though we miss a lot of pounders in Applebrook-"a pound, sir, if it weigh

t-by one of those earnest, cadaverous persons whose pride it is that they have

his latest specimen to me just now, rubb

was not, I admit, a tactful welcome to a prospective two guine

is confession gave me the right cue to his treatment. A holiday, in fact, was all that he needed, though I doubted his abi

ul civil servants that may be met at almost any time in Somerset House or the General Post Office. They have been pensioned for months, but there they are, unable to inter themselves decently amo

r this rather impressive haran

d, "been my one great d

come to see me. A physician, to a man with such a goal, seemed, on the face of it, something of a superfluity. But

pinion coincides with theirs." He handed me

y advice was going to be useless; b

r had time for hobbies. And by to-morrow afternoon he will be reading his

comes the roar of London. I believe you sigh for it sometimes, don't you, down there among your moorland silences? Give me three weeks of it a year, and, as far as I am concerned, you might monopolise the orchestra for the other forty-nine. I

le streams that t

about Harley Street is that there are exactly twelv

ty of Railway Stations. Liverpool Street, for example, smokes cheap cigarettes, and lives at Walthamstow-does its baggage up with string, and takes dribbly children to Clacton-on-Sea. A

ho announces the arrival of the visitors. Dressing-gowns must be shed,

tice you can still nip down for one perfect hour to Marleigh Pool-still feel your rod-point bending to some heave

ious old

.