CHAPTER II.THE DEAD MAN’S HEAD.
Dr. Jarvis, chief of the staff of St. Agnes’ Hospital, was well known as a peculiar man.
He was rich enough to take his leisure, but he worked like a slave. He had an elegant house on St. Nicholas avenue, but he spent all his days and more than half his nights at the hospital.
A rude cot in a little room adjoining his laboratory in the hospital was his bed four nights in seven on the average. His only recreation was found in the care of a little garden in the hospital grounds; and it was the common talk of the younger physicians that Dr. Jarvis enjoyed finding fault with the gardener more than he did cultivating the flowers.
He had a wife and a young, unmarried daughter, whom he loved devotedly, but to whom he gave only a few hours of his time in the cou
