24 MEMORIES OF MY LIFE
back door as directed, and treading softly up the back staircase to the cold garret where the poor girl lay. She was the first dead person I had seen, handsome in feature, but greatly swollen. She had been apparently in perfect health a few hours before, then she was suddenly seized with intense pain in the stomach, followed rapidly by peritonitis and death.
I can easily reproduce in imagination all the ghastly
horror of the scene and could describe it in detail, but it would be unfitted for these pages. The perforated portion of the stomach was such a small hole. Death
with a little pin, bores through the castle wall, and -farewell, King!" (King Richard 11). Mr. P. pricked his finger while sewing up the abdomen. A dissection wound when death has followed peritonitis is pro. verbially dangerous. It was so in this case, for Mr. P. nearly died of it. I returned home chilled, awed and sobered, and seemed for the time to have left boyhood behind me.
My father, ever thoughtful of securing for me the best education he could, had arranged through Mr. Hodgson that one of his most promising former pupils, who was going for a tour of a few weeks abroad, partly for vacation, partly to see certain medical institutions, should take me with him. He was William Bowman, in later years the great oculist, Sir William (1816-1892), who combined a most refined and artistic temperament with exceptional scientific ability. He obtained a European reputation for medical research long before he was thirty years of age. Thenceforward for many years he devoted himself almost entirely to professional work, and though keeping abreast of the information of the day,
