Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 146.djvu/599



was the kind of day that is called seasonable. If the sun had been obscured, the air would have been felt to be wintry; but the sunshine was full and warm, and so the world rejoiced, and declared it was a perfectly lovely May day,—just as a man who is charmed with the smiles and beauty of a woman, thinks her complete though she may have a heart of ice. Lefevre, as he went his hospital round that afternoon, found his patients revelling in the sunlight like flies. He himself was in excellent spirits, and he said a cheery or facetious word here and there as he passed, which gave infinite delight to the thin and bloodless atomies under his care; for a joke from so serious and awful a being as the doctor is to a desponding patient better than all the drugs of the pharmacopœia: it is as exquisite and sustaining as a divine text of promise to a religious enthusiast.

Dr Lefevre was thus passing round his female ward, with a train of attentive students at his heels, when the door was swung open and two attendants entered, bearing a stretcher between them, and accompanied by the house-physician and a policeman.

"What is this?" asked Lefevre, with a touch of severity; for it was irregular to intrude a fresh case into a ward while the physician was going his round.

"I thought, sir," said the house-physician, "you would like to see her at once: it seems to me a case similar to that of the man found in the Brighton train." Rh