E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Branko Collin,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
To Z. Mennell, Esq.
My dear Mennell,
It has been my fortune to seesomething of the practice of the art of healing under widelydifferent conditions, and I know none who better represents themost humane and most exacting of all professions than yourself. Thegood doctor of this story—the born surgeon and healer, theever young and alert, the self-forgetful, the faithful friend,gifted with "that exquisite charity which can forgive allthings"—is studied from you.
It is one of the greatest pleasures of my life to inscribe yourname on this dedicatory page, and to subscribe myself,
Your sincere friend and grateful patient,
J. MaclarenCobban.
London, November 1889.
Julius Courtney.
The Hyacinth Club has thereputation of selecting its members from among the freshest andmost active spirits in literature, science, and art. That is in asense true, but activity in one or another of those fields is not acondition of membership; for, just as the listening Boswell was thenecessary complement of the talking Johnson, so in the HyacinthClub there is an indispensable contingent of passive members who find their liveliestsatisfaction in hearing and looking on, rather than in speaking anddoing. Something of the home principle of male and female isnecessary for the completeness even of a club.
The Hyacinth Club-house looks upon Piccadilly and the GreenPark. The favourite place of concourse of its members is themagnificent smoking-room on the first floor, the bow-windows ofwhich command a view up and down the fashionable thoroughfare, andover the trees and the undulating sward of the Park to the gates ofBuckingham Palace. On a Monday afternoon in the beginning of May,the bow-windows were open, and several men sat in leather lounges(while one leaned against a window-sash), luxuriously smoking, andnoting