"No, the Head Surgeon. There wasn't many of my company left."

A light began to dawn upon me. I took another look at his face, and the way his head, with the ragged ear, sat on his broad shoulders, and the clear, steady gaze with which he regarded me.

"Do you mean you were in the army, Evins?"

"Yes, sir."

"During the Boer War?"

"Yes, sir."

"And where did you get that crack?"

"At Spion Kop, sir. I had another through my sleeve that burned the skin off me arm, but it didn't amount to anything. It was pretty warm for us, sir, for a while. Shall I back, sir? The rain's clearin' up a bit, and there's only a few of the wagons left. Maybe we can get one of them to stand still."

I did not answer for some minutes. "England is full of just such men," I said to myself; "have to use a corkscrew to get anything out of them." I have known dozens just like him. The last thing any one of them wants to talk about is the part he played in some drama in which every man was a hero except in his own opinion.

My chaffeur had loomed up into another and a more distinct personality-one that inspired a certain deference. Here was I, riding around London with a fellow who opened the door of my vehicle like a lackey, touched his hat when I gave him an order, brought me beer and sandwiches when I was hungry, sharpened my charcoals when I was hurried, and who ten years ago had been dragged off the worst battle

field of the war with the ravellings of three bullets clinging to his person. I soon found myself under considerable restraint in not shaking hands with him, and I would have done so had not a certain look in his eyes warned me that, for the time being at least, he was my servant, and that each one of us must keep his own place.

This same look was in his eye when I finished my sketch of the Market, and rose. It rather checked my enthusiasm, and I merely said, "Lucky you got out with a whole skin,” and bade him drive on to St. Bartholomew's the Great.

As we approached its site from around the wide Square, my eye ran along the bare wall of a great building, commercial or otherwise, until it rested on a small archway — the only entrance from this side to the church itself. Leaving the taxi on the curb, we dodged under its arch, skirted a narrow pavement, flanked by a damp, mouldy graveyard, frowned on by a row of dingy, soot-begrimed houses; then crossing a little dip in the sidewalk we made our way through the small swinging doors, into the narrow vestibule, and so on into the church.

If Mr. Thackeray or any one of his characters had aught to do with St. Bartholomew's the Great, there is nothing I can find in a diligent search through his published books to prove it. And yet, it is hardly to be supposed that he could have been unconscious of its dignity and beauty even when he was a boy at Grey Friars School; and later on, when he would revisit his old haunts on Founders' Day, reviving his early memories of the places round about its quiet courts. Nor was it too far away from those quiet