ped his pencil in fire;--who knows but that it was given
her by a midnight suitor fresh from that fierce element, and licensed for
a season to leave his couch of flame to tempt the unsanctified hearts of
earthly maidens and brand their cheeks with the print of his scorching
kisses?

She and I,--he said, as he looked steadfastly at the canvas,--she and I
are the last of 'em.--She will stay, and I shall go. They never painted
me,--except when the boys used to make pictures of me with chalk on the
board-fences. They said the doctors would want my skeleton when I was
dead.--You are my friend, if you are a doctor,--a'n't you?

I just gave him my hand. I had not the heart to speak.

I want to lie still,--he said,--after I am put to bed upon the hill
yonder. Can't you have a great stone laid over me, as they did over the
first settlers in the old burying-ground at Dorchester, so as to keep the
wolves from digging them up? I never slept easy over the sod;--I should
like to lie quiet under it. And besides,--he said, in a kind of scared
whisper,--I don't want to have my bones stared at, as my body has been.
I don't doubt I was a remarkable case; but, for God's sake, oh, for God's
sake, don't let 'em make a show of the cage I have been shut up in and
looked through the bars of for so many years.

I have heard it said that the art of healing makes men hard-hearted and
indifferent to human suffering. I am willing to own that there is often
a professional hardness in surgeons, just as there is in
theologians,--only much less in degree than in these last. It does not
commonly improve the sympathies of a man to be in the habit of thrusting
knives into his fellow-creatures and burning them with red-hot irons, any
more than it improves them to hold the blinding-white cantery of Gehenna
by its cool handle and score and crisp young souls with it until they are
scorched into the belief of--Transubstantiation or the Immaculate
Conception. And, to say the plain truth, I think there are a good many
coarse people in both callings. A delicate nature will not commonly
choose a pursuit which implies the habitual infliction of suffering, so
readily as some gentler office. Yet, while I am writing this paragraph,
there passes by my window, on his daily errand of duty, not seeing me,
though I catch a glimpse of his manly features through the oval glass of
his chaise, as he drives by, a surgeon of skill and standing, so
friendly, so modes