The casualty-room never emptied before evening, and for a week I was too busy even to notice Bingham. We met professionally only once a day, at the noon interlude in the clinical rough-and-tumble known as 'minor ops'. This was for surgery too lowly for the main operating theatres, and was performed by Bingham and myself in an undignified theatre made by a partitioned corner of the casualty-room, containing a galvanized-iron operating table, an Edwardian dental-chair decorated with gilt _fleurs de lys,_ and a small anaesthetic apparatus on which some former house surgeon had written _Property of the Gas, Fight, and Choke Company._ Although we made our incisions with scapels that would have been hurled to the floor in the main theatre, and probably had been, it was minor ops. that made the casualty job tolerable: as newly-qualified prospective surgeons, both of us had the same enthusiasm for the knife as the Committee of Public Safety for the guillotine.

I shortly became aware that Bingham always had far more cases waiting on the benches outside minor ops. than I did. As we took alternate patients coming through the casualty-door I envied his luck, until I discovered that he had the habit of stopping people he saw in the street with promising boils, warts, moles, or cysts, handing them his card, and telling them to come to the casualty-room of St Swithin's at midday and ask specifically for himself. This brought him a brisk practice of taxi drivers, railway porters, bus conductors, tea-shop waitresses, newsvendors, and roadmenders, and he not only removed the lump and others found by a more searching examination than was possible in public, but usually pulled out their ingrowing toe-nails and extracted their bad teeth as well.