Dr. Bradley Remembers [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE (i) Between six and eight on Friday, October the thirty-first, the day appointed for his handing over his practice to the young man who had bought it. Dr. Bradley "took" his evening surgery as usual and for the last time. At six o'clock precisely, shod in the carpet slippers that were so familiar a relief to his feet which had probably tramped no less than ten miles during the last eight hours, he shuffled through the short passage, no wider than a liner's alleyway, which united the house—^at the junction of Halesby Road and Crabb's Lane—in which he lived, to the surgery itself. This was a small one-storeyed annexe, consisting of two major compartments. The outer, directly approached from Crabb's Lane by a strip of blue bricks on whose criss-cross ridges three generations of his patients had politely scraped away the gritty Black-country mud or stamped off the cindery snow, was completely separated from the next by a wall of plastered lath with a door in the middle. The inner half of the building was sub-divided unequally by a partition of beery varnished deal, five feet high, surmounted by