aim which he saw so close before his eyes: matriculating out of the fifth class at school; putting in a short time at Heidelberg before he went to Leiden: he was so very young, only seventeen; passing his first examination in a year, his second in eighteen months, taking three intermediate courses in the next five years, during which period he also acquired practical experience with a demonstrator at Vienna; and lastly taking his degree at the age of twenty-six. His parents rejoiced when, after those nine years at the university and abroad, he settled down with them at Driebergen, when they had him back in their house, where, despite the presence of all Uncle Gerrit's children, he had left a feeling of emptiness. . . . A short spell of the tenderness of living with them all again; and his love for mankind had developed so quickly, making him find his patients inevitably among the poorest of the rural population, or sometimes in the villages, or even at Utrecht or Amsterdam. . . . He never spoke about them, maintaining an earnest silence about the things which he did, even as he was silent about the secret force which he so certainly knew himself to possess. . . . Never had he spoken to anybody over that poor little girl, a child of twelve, the daughter of two wretched labourers, a cripple since the age of five, whom, with the veriest trifle of material assistance, but more particularly through his sure power of will, he had gradually helped to raise herself from her bed of straw, enabled to move herself about, until she could now walk on her frail and yielding little legs. . . . He might have been ashamed of a cure so incredible, for he had never talked about it, not even to his mother, not even to his father. . . .
Oh, it lasted such a short time, the tenderness of that time when he lived with them all again, with
