few nor unimportant, the title has adhered to
him until this day.

I have already said that his personal appearance was good, a
circumstance which of course was not at all to his disadvantage. His
first business in his new station, was the selection of a genteel
boarding-house, the purchase of a new and fashionable suit of clothes,
and a snuff-box. Ever partial to the society of ladies, he was
assiduous in his efforts to cultivate their acquaintance, especially of
those among them who were of a literary turn. Chief of the female
literati of the town, was a lady of no certain age, but of great
pretensions, whose hose were deeply _azure_. With her he became quite
intimate, and she found his services particularly convenient, in
sending to the circulating library for books, and in other respects in
which it was found he could render himself useful; and he in turn was
never more truly happy than when obeying the behests of a blue of such
celebrity. These preliminary arrangements occupied about three or four
months of the first year, during which he could of course have but
little time to attend to his books. He did, however, make a beginning;
but mental application was no easier now, than when in college, and he
had moreover succeeded in forming acquaintances in a larger and more
attractive circle than was to be found within and about the college
walls. It required the greater portions of his mornings to keep alive
these acquaintances; and every body knows it is no time for hard study
after a hearty dinner--of which, particularly if it were good, few were
more fond than "Doctor Wheelwright." Thus the first year found him
scarcely at the close of the first chapter of Cheselden's Anatomy.

An attendance upon the lectures of some regular medical college was of
course essential to a thorough professional education, and his father
had now become ambitious of doing the best for a son upon whom he began
to look as a young man of high promise. Every where he was now spoken
of as "young Doctor Wheelwright;" and there was something gratifying to
a parent's ear in that. He was therefore sent to New-York to hear the
instructive eloquence of Hosack; the wise and prudent counsels of Post;
to press into his goblet the grapes of wisdom clustering around the
tongue of Mitchill; and to acquire the principles of surgery from the
lips, and the skilful use of the knife from the untrembling hand, of
Mott. Tickets were procured for all the regula