"Doyle, Arthur Conan - Round The Red Lamp" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doyle Arthur Conan)

sheaf of note-books in his hand. There were pale,
frightened lads, fresh from the high schools, and
callous old chronics, whose generation had passed on
and left them. They swept in an unbroken,
tumultuous stream from the university gate to the
hospital. The figures and gait of the men were
young, but there was little youth in most of their
faces. Some looked as if they ate too little--a few
as if they drank too much. Tall and short, tweed-
coated and black, round-shouldered, bespectacled, and
slim, they crowded with clatter of feet and rattle of
sticks through the hospital gate. Now and again they
thickened into two lines, as the carriage of a
surgeon of the staff rolled over the cobblestones
between.

"There's going to be a crowd at Archer's,"
whispered the senior man with suppressed excitement.
"It is grand to see him at work. I've seen him jab
all round the aorta until it made me jumpy to watch
him. This way, and mind the whitewash."

They passed under an archway and down a long,
stone-flagged corridor, with drab-coloured doors on
either side, each marked with a number. Some of them
were ajar, and the novice glanced into them with
tingling nerves. He was reassured to catch a glimpse
of cheery fires, lines of white-counterpaned beds,
and a profusion of coloured texts upon the wall. The
corridor opened upon a small hall, with a fringe of
poorly clad people seated all round upon benches. A
young man, with a pair of scissors stuck like a
flower in his buttonhole and a note-book in his hand,
was passing from one to the other, whispering and
writing.

"Anything good?" asked the third year's man.

"You should have been here yesterday," said the
out-patient clerk, glancing up. "We had a regular
field day. A popliteal aneurism, a Colles' fracture,
a spina bifida, a tropical abscess, and an
elephantiasis. How's that for a single haul?"

"I'm sorry I missed it. But they'll come again,
I suppose. What's up with the old gentleman?"

A broken workman was sitting in the shadow,
rocking himself slowly to and fro, and groaning. A
woman beside him was trying to console him, patting