Why, I asked, should he not come and set up here on his own?
I would appoint him doctor to the estate and also give him charge of a cottage hospital which I was endowing, with liberty to build and arrange it as he liked.

Further, as I considered that it would be of great advantage to me to have a man of real ability within reach, I would guarantee for three years whatever income he was earning in London.
He thanked me warmly and in the end acted on the idea, with startling results so far as his prospects were concerned.

Very soon his really remarkable skill became known and he was earning more money than as an unmarried man he could possibly want.

Indeed, scarcely a big operation took place at any town within twenty miles, and even much farther away, at which he was not called in to assist.
Needless to say his advent was a great boon to me, for as he lived in a house I let him quite near by, whenever he had a spare evening he would drop in to dinner, and from our absolutely opposite standpoints we discussed all things human and divine.

Thus I was enabled to sharpen my wits upon the hard steel of his clear intellect which was yet, in a sense, so limited.
I must add that I never converted him to my way of thinking and he never converted me to his, any more than he converted Bastin, for whom, queerly enough, he had a liking.