k of
the eagle's wings, being clipped so that he shall never lift himself over
the farm-yard fence! Such things happen, and always must,--because, as
one of us said awhile ago, a man always loves, a woman, and a woman a
man, unless some good reason exists to the contrary. You think yourself
a very fastidious young man, my friend; but there are probably at least
five-thousand young women in these United States, any one of whom you
would certainly marry, if you were thrown much into her company, and
nobody more attractive were near, and she had no objection. And you, my
dear young lady, justly pride yourself on your discerning delicacy; but
if I should say that there are twenty thousand young men, any one of
whom, if he offered his hand and heart under favorable circumstances, you
would

"First endure, then pity, then embrace,"

I should be much more imprudent than I mean to be, and you would, no
doubt, throw down a story in which I hope to interest you.

I had settled it in my mind that this young fellow had a career marked
out for him. He should begin in the natural way, by taking care of poor
patients in one of the public charities, and work his way up to a better
kind of practice,--better, that is, in the vulgar, worldly sense. The
great and good Boerhaave used to say, as I remember very well, that the
poor were his best patients; for God was their paymaster. But everybody
is not as patient as Boerhaave, nor as deserving; so that the rich,
though not, perhaps, the best patients, are good enough for common
practitioners. I suppose Boerhaave put up with them when he could not
get poor ones, as he left his daughter two millions of florins when he
died.

Now if this young man once got into the wide streets, he would sweep them
clear of his rivals of the same standing; and as I was getting
indifferent to business, and old Dr. Kilham was growing careless, and had
once or twice prescribed morphine when he meant quinine, there would soon
be an opening into the Doctor's Paradise,--the streets with only one side
to them. Then I would have him strike a bold stroke,--set up a nice
little coach, and be driven round like a first-class London doctor,
instead of coasting about in a shabby one-horse concern and casting
anchor opposite his patients' doors like a Cape Ann fishing-smack. By
the time he was thirty, he would have knocked the social pawns out of his
way, and be ready to challenge a wife from the row o