Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II CONCERNING JAMES I Have confused impressions of that first visit to the house of Dr. Brink. It was so late when we entered, you see, and all within the house was strange and unexpected, and the duck and Burgundy were very peace- provoking. The sort of house which I had expected the doctor to inhabit was not at all the sort of house he really lived in. I had, perhaps, no very definite ideas at all. One knows the ordinary doctor's house: a cool and studious consulting-room, having leathern armchairs and a telephone and a stethoscope and some framed engravings after Landseer and a silver goblet which he won at tennis in the eighties and a case of text-books and a mule canary and claret plush curtains and the centenary edition of Sir Walter Scott. And a very quiet and lofty waiting-room, containing all the illustrated papers for last April and a reading-glass and a stereoscope, besides a decanter of water and three clean tumblers. One knows that sort of house, I say, and likewise the gentle, murmuring press of sufferers which lays siege to it. But the spot-cash practitioners of Mile End Road are rather strange and foreign to us. We do not go into their little, weird consulting- hatches nor sweat amid the tumult of their vulgar patrons. We can imagine what the thing is like: and there are some of us perhaps who imagine truthfully. I didn't. My imagination did not run to Japanese colour prints and pastel studies, and neatly framed examples of the art of Mr. Nicholson. And yet these things were hung upon the white distempered walls of Dr. Brink's infirmary. I figured the tumult as gazing speechlessly upon these curious East End substitutes for Landseer. "What do they think of them ? " I asked the doctor. " They are much amused," said he. We were standing before a pas...