I turned, and recognized the first obstacle in my professional path. It was Bingham, the other Junior Casualty House Surgeon. He was a pale youth with thick spectacles and bushy hair, who still looked seventeen and always had boils. As a student he was never a frontbench squatter, but he had once won the Dean's Prize in applied anatomy and thereafter always walked through the students' quarters with the Lancet sticking from his pocket like a flag and a couple of large books under his arm. Every lunch hour he carried these books to the library, where he ate his cheese sandwiches and removed from the reference volumes dust which he transferred during the afternoon to the instructive abdomens of patients in the wards. Every Saturday when, the library closed he moved to the surgical pathology museum, where patients' organs were stored away in thick glass jars on shelves like left luggage, and carried his books round the galleries instead. Bingham seemed to absorb a good deal of knowledge from the armpit.

'I'm jolly pleased you got the other cas, job, old chap,' he said, grabbing my sleeve. 'I wondered who it'd go to. Could have been deuced tricky. Suppose they'd given it to some awful stinker. See what I mean? But we'll get along top-hole together, won't we?'

'Yes, we're pretty well bound to, I suppose.'

'I say,' he went on enthusiastically. 'This is a lark, isn't it?'

'What's a lark?'

'Being qualified and all that. I mean, now we can get on with things properly. I've got a couple of septic fingers, a lipoma, and four circs. lined up for minor ops. already.' He rubbed his hands, as if contemplating a good dinner. 'The Prof. stuck his nose in and said I was pretty quick off the mark. By the way, old chap, he asked why you weren't there.'

'But why should I have been there?' I asked in surprise. 'The job only starts today, surely?'