Dr. Shrapnel

“ Mingled with the rattle of machine-guns, the sharp reports of rifle-shots, and the crash of steel, were shouts of vengeful triumph and the cries of the wounded. Through the eddying clouds of dust and smoke tiles and bricks from the shelled houses flew in showers. Occasionally whole buildings would collapse like a pack of cards, burying the German machine gunners in the ruins. Fires, too, were breaking out to add to the horrors of the scene, while with typical indifference the German artillery were dropping shrapnel and gas-shells in the midst of the pack of swaying and struggling combatants. ”

“ Suddenly, at about ten o'clock, a dull thud sounded somewhere far away from us, and simultaneously we saw a small white round cloud about half a mile ahead of us where the shrapnel had exploded. The battle had begun. ”

“ If the visitor can be turned away easily, all is well and quiet. Dr. Sprague can do the job with ease. But if the visitor, like yourself, Mr. Cornell, proposes something that distresses the good Dr. Sprague and will not be loftily dismissed, Dr. Sprague's blood pressure goes up. We all keep a bit of esper on his nervous system and when the fuse begins to blow, we come out and effect a double rescue."
I laughed with him. Apparently the Medical Center staff enjoyed needling Dr. Sprague. "Scholar Phelps, before I get into my theory, I'd like to know more about Mekstrom's Disease. ”

“ A little before six Constance Sherrill and Spearman called to inquire after him and were admitted for a few moments to his room. She came to him, bent over him, while she spoke the few words of sympathy the nurse allowed to her; she stood back then while Spearman spoke to him. In the succeeding days, he saw her nearly every day, accompanied always by her father or Spearman; it was the full two weeks the nurse had allotted for his remaining in the hospital before he saw her alone. ”

“ Mr. Spragg was standing near her mother, who sat in a drooping attitude, her head sunk on her breast, as she did when she had one of her "turns." He looked up abruptly as Undine entered.
"Father--has mother told you? Mrs. Fairford has asked me to dine. She's Mrs. Paul Marvell's daughter--Mrs. Marvell was a Dagonet--and they're sweller than anybody; they WON'T KNOW the Driscolls and Van Degens!"
Mr. Spragg surveyed her with humorous fondness.
"That so? What do they want to know you for, I wonder?" he jeered. ”

“ Scroggs’s name. Frank is now a doctor, or rather a surgeon, in the same city with Joe, and becoming very distinguished. The other day he performed a great operation, saving a woman’s life, which was in all the papers. He said to an interviewer that he became a surgeon from dressing a sore on an old mare’s back. I wonder what he was talking about? He is about to start a woman’s hospital for poor women. Cousin Fanny would have been glad of that; she was always proud of Frank. ”

“ Having thus described the nature and symptoms of scrofula, I shall now proceed to make some observations on the treatment of that disease.
The cure of scrofula is generally so difficult that it has become an opprobrium of surgery. There is not one specific remedy for it; even the medicines and applications which I am in the habit of employing, will not be equally efficacious in persons of different constitutions, nor in the same person at all times; and as such, some little alteration frequently becomes necessary to adapt the remedies to the present state of the disease. ”

“ Edward Topsell, author of The Historie of Four-footed Beastes, who defends his veracity by asserting that he does not write "for the rude and vulgar sort, who being utterly ignorant of the operation of learning, do presently condemne al strange things," says of the Shrew that "it is a ravening beast, feigning itself gentle and tame, but, being touched, it biteth deep and poysoneth deadly. It beareth a cruel minde, desiring to hurt anything, neither is there any creature that it loveth, or it loveth him, because it is feared of all." ”

“ It will be remembered that Fleur-de-Marie, saved by La Louve, had been conveyed not far from the Isle du Ravageur to the country-house of Doctor Griffon, one of the surgeons of the hospital, to whom we shall now introduce the reader. This learned doctor, who had obtained from high influence his position in the hospital, considered the wards as a kind of school of experiments, where he tried on the poor the remedies and applications which he afterwards used with his rich clients.
These terrible experiments were, indeed, a human sacrifice made on the altar of science ”

“ Brant waiting. A bell rang twelve. The two, in silence, walked down the stairs, crossed the court (averting their eyes from the stretchers) and went to the hotel to get something to eat.
Midnight came. It passed. No one in the hurried confused world of the hospital had heard of the possibility of the surgeon’s returning. When Campton mentioned it to the nurse she smiled her tired smile, and said: “He could have done nothing.”
Done nothing! How could she know? How could any one, but the surgeon himself? Would he have promised if he had not thought there was some chance? ”

“ Mr. Spragg, thereafter, had begun to be a power in Apex, and fat years had followed on the lean. Ralph Marvell was too little versed in affairs to read between the lines of Mrs. Spragg's untutored narrative, and he understood no more than she the occult connection between Mr. Spragg's domestic misfortunes and his business triumph. Mr. Spragg had "helped out" his ruined father-in-law, and had vowed on his children's graves that no Apex child should ever again drink poisoned water--and out of those two disinterested impulses, by some impressive law of compensation, material prosperity had come. ”

“ Bell, who says that he has not only found the remains of that animal in its stomach, but has also fed it upon slugs in confinement. Like its ally, the Mole, it is very pugnacious, and two Shrews rarely come together without a battle, when the weaker one is killed and eaten. The breeding season of the Shrew is in the spring, when the female makes a comfortable nest of soft dry herbage in some convenient hole in the ground, and there brings forth from five to seven young ones. Their increase is checked to a certain extent by natural enemies. ”

“ Then the liver, the heart, the spleen, and even the brain itself, may become the seats of this dreadful disease. Lastly, we may mention that the bones are very commonly affected, and even destroyed, from the attacks and long continuance of the disease. Hence it will be seen, that both internal and external parts of the human body are equally liable to the ravages of scrofula; and it is proper to remark, that it often commences externally, and after an uncertain time, it leaves the surface and attacks the internal parts, in which case it almost invariably terminates fatally. ”

“ In her severe uniform of blue linen, her dusky skin darkened by the nurse's cap, and by the pale background of the hospital walls, she had seemed older, more competent and experienced; but he now saw how fresh was the pale [p 10] curve of her cheek, and how smooth the brow clasped in close waves of hair.
"I began at the wrong end," he acknowledged. "But let me put Dillon's case before you dismiss me."
She softened. "It is only because of my interest in that poor fellow that I am here——"
"Because you think he needs help—and that you can help him?" ”

“ Ralph's weak bones ached under his handshake.
"How's Mrs. Marvell?" he turned back from his landing to call out; and Ralph answered: "Thanks; she's very well."
Mr. Spragg sat alone in his murky inner office, the fly-blown engraving of Daniel Webster above his head and the congested scrap-basket beneath his feet. He looked fagged and sallow, like the day.
Ralph sat down on the other side of the desk. For a moment his throat contracted as it had when he had tried to question his sister; then he asked: "Where's Undine?"
Mr. Spragg glanced at the calendar that hung from a hat-peg on the door. ”

“ It is from this difficulty of cure that so many remedies have been proposed in scrofula; and yet the same difficulty continues, plainly shewing that the greater part of these nostra are mere deceptions, imposing upon the sufferer, both in mind and pocket. Hence the proposers of these fictitious remedies become more bold and impudent than ever; nothing is too barefaced for them to publish; not even that they can extract carious bone without any other aid than "the power of their medicines,"—than which nothing can be more impudently false. ”

“ This was what he had worked out in his head, and what he meant to say to his sister; but something seemed to snap shut in his throat, and he closed his eyes without speaking.
Even when Mr. Spragg came to see him he said nothing. They talked about his illness, about the hot weather, about the rumours that Harmon B. Driscoll was again threatened with indictment; and then Mr. Spragg pulled himself out of his chair and said: "I presume you'll call round at the office before you leave the city."
"Oh, yes: as soon as I'm up," Ralph answered. They understood each other. ”

“ Spragg's large lazy irony, and the incident drew the two men nearer together. Mrs. Spragg, for her part, was certainly not delicate; but she was simple and without malice, and Ralph liked her for her silent acceptance of her diminished state. Sometimes, as he sat between the lonely primitive old couple, he wondered from what source Undine's voracious ambitions had been drawn: all she cared for, and attached importance to, was as remote from her parents' conception of life as her impatient greed from their passive stoicism. ”

“ Mr. Spragg's brows began to jut. "More bills?"
"No." She stretched out her hand and began to finger the dusty objects on his desk. "I'm unhappy at home."
"Unhappy--!" His start overturned the gorged waste-paper basket and shot a shower of paper across the rug. He stooped to put the basket back; then he turned his slow fagged eyes on his daughter. "Why, he worships the ground you walk on, Undie."
"That's not always a reason, for a woman--" It was the answer she would have given to Popple or Van Degen, but she saw in an instant the mistake of thinking it would impress her father. ”

“ To take just our chances in living,
Would you be a cat?
LUCY LARCOM.
"SCRAMBLE."
Doctor Schroeder was a quaint old German physician, who lived in a fine old-fashioned house near a public play-ground. Connected with the doctor's premises was an extensive peach orchard, and, sad to say, naughty boys would sometimes climb over the orchard wall and pilfer his peaches. To guard against this practice the doctor had the top of his wall adorned with a row of very ugly iron spikes. Not far from Doctor Schroeder's place lived a family known as "the Jones's". ”

“ It is a curious fact that only adults and young, but none of intermediate size, happen to be known. This creature shows many important features. The vertebrae and ribs are not fused with, but remain free from, the carapace, and this is fundamentally different from and not homologous with that of other Chelonians. O. P. Hay has suggested that the mosaic polygonal components of the shell of Sphargis are, so to spea, an earlier generation of osteodermal plates than the fewer and larger plates of the Thecophora, which in them fuse with the neural arches and the ribs. ”

“ Sprague was smoking peacefully. It was perhaps too much to expect that a man whose problems were chiefly in the field of laboratory science should be very deeply interested in one in which the elements were merely human. When he spoke again it was to recur to his favorable impression of Tarbell. "I like that young fellow," he said in conclusion. "He'll pull you out of the hole—with a little timely help from the newspapers. When he gets the ball into his hands and starts down the field with it, you'd best be prepared for some pretty sensational developments. ”

“ Marvell her helplessness had infected Undine, and their half-hour in the sober faded drawing-room remained among the girl's most unsatisfactory memories.
She re-entered it alone with more assurance. Her confidence in her beauty had hitherto carried her through every ordeal; and it was fortified now by the feeling of power that came with the sense of being loved. If they would only leave her mother out she was sure, in her own phrase, of being able to "run the thing"; and Mrs. Spragg had providentially been left out of the Dagonet dinner. ”

“ On Saturday afternoons, when the business world was hurrying to the country for golf and tennis, he stayed in town and took Paul to see the Spraggs. Several times since his wife's departure he had tried to bring about closer relations between his own family and Undine's; and the ladies of Washington Square, in their eagerness to meet his wishes, had made various friendly advances to Mrs. Spragg. But they were met by a mute resistance which made Ralph suspect that Undine's strictures on his family had taken root in her mother's brooding mind ”

“ Ralph felt the same hardness and lucidity that had come to him when he had heard his sister's answer.
"She's gone, you mean? Left me? With another man?"
Mr. Spragg drew himself up with a kind of slouching majesty. "My daughter is not that style. I understand Undine thinks there have been mistakes on both sides. She considers the tie was formed too hastily. I believe desertion is the usual plea in such cases."
Ralph stared about him, hardly listening. He did not resent his father-in-law's tone. In a dim way he guessed that Mr. Spragg was suffering hardly less than himself. ”