The greatest authority in Europe on comparative anatomy, now that Huxley was taken from us, he had devoted his later days to the pursuit of medicine proper, to which he brought a mind stored with luminous analogies from the lower animals.  His very appearance held one.  Tall, thin, erect, with an ascetic profile not unlike Cardinal Manning’s, he represented that abstract form of asceticism which consists in absolute self-sacrifice to a mental ideas, not that which consists in religious abnegation.  Three years of travel in Africa had tanned his skin for life.  His long white hair, straight and silvery as it fell, just curled in one wave-like inward sweep where it turned and rested on the stooping shoulders.  His pale face was clean-shaven, save for a thin and wiry grizzled moustache, which cast into stronger relief the deep-set, hawk-like eyes and the acute, intense, intellectual features.  In some respects, his countenance reminded me often of Dr. Martineau’s:  in others it recalled the knife-like edge, unturnable, of his great predecessor, Professor Owen.  Wherever he went, men turned to stare at him.  In Paris, they took him for the head of the English Socialists; in Russia, they declared he was a Nihilist emissary.  And they were not far wrong—­in essence; for Sebastian’s stern, sharp face was above all things the face of a man absorbed and engrossed by one overpowering pursuit in life—­the sacred thirst of knowledge, which had swallowed up his entire nature.

He was what he looked—­the most single-minded person I have ever come across.  And when I say single-minded, I mean just that, and no more.  He had an End to attain—­the advancement of science, and he went straight towards the End, looking neither to the right nor to the left for anyone.  An American millionaire once remarked to him of some ingenious appliance he was describing:  “Why, if you were to perfect that apparatus, Professor, and take out a patent for it, I reckon you’d make as much money as I have made.”  Sebastian withered him with a glance.  “I have no time to waste,” he replied, “on making money!”

So, when Hilda Wade told me, on the first day I met her, that she wished to become a nurse at Nathaniel’s, “to be near Sebastian,” I was not at all astonished.  I took her at her word.  Everybody who meant business in any branch of the medical art, however humble, desired to be close to our rare teacher—­to drink in his large thought, to profit by his clear insight, his wide experience.  The man of Nathaniel’s was revolutionising practice; and those who wished to feel themselves abreast of the modern movement were naturally anxious to cast in their lot with him.  I did not wonder, therefore, that Hilda Wade, who herself possessed in so large a measure the deepest feminine gift—­intuition—­should seek a place under the famous professor who represented the other side of the same endowment in its masculine embodiment—­instinct of diagnosis.