I have seen Thornton enter a kitchen, with that quiet reassuring step of his, and lay out his instruments on the table, while a kitchen tap with a broken washer was sprizzling within a few feet of him, as calmly and as quietly as if he were in his lecture-room of the Plumbers' College.
"You never go into a cellar ?" asked Fortescue.

"But hang it, man, I don't see how one can avoid it!" "Well, I do avoid it," answered Thornton, "at least as far as I possibly can.

I send down my solderist, of course, but personally, unless it is absolutely necessary, I never go down." "That's all very well, my dear fellow," Fortescue cut in, "but you know as well as I do that you get case after case where the cellar diagnosis is simply vital.

I had a case last week, a most interesting thing--" he turned to the group of us as he spoke--"a double lesion of a gas-pipe under a cement floor--half a dozen of my colleagues had been absolutely baffled.

They had made an entirely false diagnosis, operated on the dining-room floor, which they removed and carried home, and when I was called in they had just obtained permission from the Stone Mason's Protective Association to knock down one side of the house." "Excuse me interrupting just a minute," interjected a member of the group who hailed from a distant city, "have you much trouble about that?
I mean about knocking the sides out of houses ?" "No trouble now," said Fortescue.