The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 163: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

156 A Medical Student’s Love. we drove home he told me why. Strange as such a con- fession would seem, coming from such an experienced _ physician, he had been unnerved by the sight of the body of a young woman on the dissecting table. “Come in to dinner,” he said, as the carriage drew up at his home, “and afterward we will go into the office and I will tell you why no amount of experience can accustom me to the dissecting table when the subject is a young woman.”’ I accepted the invitation, and after a dinner served in irreproachable style we shut ourselves in his office, or rather his study, for he had a downtown office, and while smoking our after-dinner cigars he told me the story of his life. I say of his life because the winning of his wife was the turning point in it. “IT have no doubt but that you have often wondered how I, a poor medical student, came to marry the daugh- ter of Henry Arnold,” he began. I nodded assent, and he continued: “The story is a queer one, and if I were not able to give unimpeachable testimony to its truthfulness I would not dare tell it, even to you, so certain am I that most people would set me down as an Ananias. “The first year that I was in the medical college I se- cured a position as nurse in one of the hospitals, both for the training it would give me and for the money it would bring in. “It was there that I first saw Edith. She came regu- larly to bring flowers to the patients, and we always ex- GEomichook (Eo)