citadel to ask for a guard of soldiers. Olga, if
danger comes——"

"Hush, Andrew," cried Olga, "here is my
father!" And she turned to talk to the parrot.

In the evening of the same day, entering the
room occupied by the students, I was hailed
with a cheer as I arrived, and the porter of
the hospital, Alexis, a good-natured thickset
fellow, with an enormous hydrocephalic skull,
ran to place me a seat in the centre of the
assembly. The students gathered round me. The
scapegrace of the hospital, Ivan Pellican, was
addressing the rest. It was he, I was sure, who
had been rash enough to send that letter about
the new drug to the Journal de St. Petersburg.

I advanced and seized him laughingly by the
arm. "Why, you rascal," said I, "it was you,
then, who sent that letter to the Journal. It'll
be my ruin!"

Ivan, not the least disturbed, went on with
a bantering speech about me and the new
remedy. He was a little bright-eyed man, with
pearl-buttoned gaiters and a white paletot.

At the end of Pellican's burlesque, the drug,
resembling a greenish root bruised together,
was passed round among the students. Every
one pinched a bit off and tasted it.

The noise of the door opening startled us. We
looked round; it was Dr. Tillmann.

"So this is how my students spend their
time," said the stern old man, "plotting mutiny,
and proposing schemes that subvert all
discipline. Away with this trumpery weed. Mr.
Campbell, after your denial of this morning, I
am surprised at your want of ingenuousness.
There, no outburst! I am accustomed to the
violent self-assertions of youth."

The doctor swept out of the room and slammed
the door.

Next day the symptoms of effervescence
among the serfs became alarming. Several
cholera carts were stopped on their way to the
hospital, the patients were taken out, the
vehicles were broken up and thrown into the
Fontanka canal, and the horses turned loose.
In the great hay-market outside the hospital,
immense crowds assembled, shouting at the
great entrance: "Let us kill these murderers,
the doctors!" The hay and wood sellers
transacted no business, the quass and beer stalls
were unfrequented, even the tea stalls had,
I observed, but few customers. None of the
richer classes were seen; the people gathered
into dangerous whispering knots. That these
groups were talking about the hospital there
could be no doubt, for every third speaker
had his hand stretched out and pointing at it.

Once, and once only, as we passed one of the
large windows in the first ward, I could not help
directing Dr. Tillmann's attention to these
ominous symptoms; but all the answer the doctor
would deign to give was:

"Our peasants are stupid pigs, but they
will not dare to lift a finger against the Petro-
Paulovsky Hospital. No! They would as soon
set fire to the cathedral. What comes suddenly,
goes suddenly. This fire will soon burn
itself out." He would not discuss the matter
with me, and we went round the beds with the
students.

Having an hour or so to myself before the
night patients arrived, and there being now
no signs of any more dangerous concourse in.
the hay-market, I stole to my own quiet room
at the left wing of the hospital, near the
anatomical museum, to complete my chemical
experiments on the musk-root, before communicating
my discovery to the chief physicians in
London and Paris.

It was a beautiful April evening; the full
moon shining through my window upon my
retort, and my glass phials, and scales, gave
the room the look of an alchemist's chamber,
for its beams fell in squares, and lines, and
wavering glimmers, on my open books, and
my saucers of tests and acids. The white wall
of the hospital garden below, gleamed as if it
were solid silver. I was absorbed in the ardour
of discovery. I treated a part of the membrane
of the root with sulphuric acid, and it turned
an intense purple. I was more and more certain
now that my discovery was one of importance to
the scientific world one that would bring me
fame and fortune. But how was I, an unknown
man, kept in obscurity by a jealous superior, to
make the discovery public? My proofs would
have no weight in the eyes of prejudiced men
disliking a novelty which superseded the old
remedies of their youth. I was not enthusiast
enough to believe I had found a panacea, but I
was sure that I had found a reliable aid to the
cholera doctor.

Pellican burst into the room with something
in a teacup.

"Hurrah, Campbell!" he cried; "I've distilled
the stuff as you wished me, and here it is.
Reinsch and I have been at it ever since the last
case of collapse was put into his bath."

In rushed Reinsch (an enthusiastic flaxen-
haired German) in raptures. He had treated
his solution with lime and muriate of soda, and
the result had been a sediment consisting of
gum, starch, and saline matter. In a moment
we were seated, our three heads together, ex-
amining the precipitate with the true ardour
of philanthropic discoverers.

We all liked Reinsch, who was one of those
quiet amiable dreamers, too negative in quality
for any one to dislike. But Pellican was my
great crony. He was a native of Little Russia,
an impulsive warm-hearted fellow, as eager at
study as at pleasure, our best surgeon, our best
billiard-player. One moment you found him
absorbed in the laboratory, and next moment
you would find him shouting and singing among
a party of card-players, and looming out of
clouds of circling smoke.

We were well into our work, when, to my
infinite chagrin, the door flew open, and in
burst eight or ten medical students. They
were Hungarians, Danes, Prussians, Armenians
— noisy reckless good-natured fellows— in
many varieties of costume. One of them, who
had, perhaps, taken a little too much wine (in