“You have no inclination in Mr. Kenge’s way?” suggested Mr. Jarndyce.

“I don’t know that, sir!” replied Richard.  “I am fond of boating.  Articled clerks go a good deal on the water.  It’s a capital profession!”

“Surgeon—­” suggested Mr. Jarndyce.

“That’s the thing, sir!” cried Richard.

I doubt if he had ever once thought of it before.

“That’s the thing, sir,” repeated Richard with the greatest enthusiasm.  “We have got it at last.  M.R.C.S.!”

He was not to be laughed out of it, though he laughed at it heartily.  He said he had chosen his profession, and the more he thought of it, the more he felt that his destiny was clear; the art of healing was the art of all others for him.  Mistrusting that he only came to this conclusion because, having never had much chance of finding out for himself what he was fitted for and having never been guided to the discovery, he was taken by the newest idea and was glad to get rid of the trouble of consideration, I wondered whether the Latin verses often ended in this or whether Richard’s was a solitary case.

Mr. Jarndyce took great pains to talk with him seriously and to put it to his good sense not to deceive himself in so important a matter.  Richard was a little grave after these interviews, but invariably told Ada and me that it was all right, and then began to talk about something else.

“By heaven!” cried Mr. Boythorn, who interested himself strongly in the subject—­though I need not say that, for he could do nothing weakly; “I rejoice to find a young gentleman of spirit and gallantry devoting himself to that noble profession!  The more spirit there is in it, the better for mankind and the worse for those mercenary task-masters and low tricksters who delight in putting that illustrious art at a disadvantage in the world.  By all that is base and despicable,” cried Mr. Boythorn, “the treatment of surgeons aboard ship is such that I would submit the legs—­both legs—­of every member of the Admiralty Board to a compound fracture and render it a transportable offence in any qualified practitioner to set them if the system were not wholly changed in eight and forty hours!”

“Wouldn’t you give them a week?” asked Mr. Jarndyce.

“No!” cried Mr. Boythorn firmly.  “Not on any consideration!  Eight and forty hours!  As to corporations, parishes, vestry-boards, and similar gatherings of jolter-headed clods who assemble to exchange such speeches that, by heaven, they ought to be worked in quicksilver mines for the short remainder of their miserable existence, if it were only to prevent their detestable English from contaminating a language spoken in the presence of the sun—­as to those fellows, who meanly take advantage of the ardour of gentlemen in the pursuit of knowledge to recompense the inestimable services of the best years of their lives, their long study, and their expensive education with pittances too small for the acceptance of clerks, I would have the necks of every one of them wrung and their skulls arranged in Surgeons’ Hall for the contemplation of the whole profession in order that its younger members might understand from actual measurement, in early life, how thick skulls may become!”