t. There are natural filters as
well as artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more
or less turbid, if you will look long enough, you may find a spring that
sparkles as no water does which drips through your apparatus of
sands and sponges. So there are families which refine themselves
into intellectual aptitude without having had much opportunity for
intellectual acquirements. A series of felicitous crosses develops an
improved strain of blood, and reaches its maximum perfection at last in
the large uncombed youth who goes to college and startles the hereditary
class-leaders by striding past them all. That is Nature's republicanism;
thank God for it, but do not let it make you illogical. The race of the
hereditary scholar has exchanged a certain portion of its animal vigor
for its new instincts, and it is hard to lead men without a good deal
of animal vigor. The scholar who comes by Nature's special grace from an
unworn stock of broad-chested sires and deep-bosomed mothers must always
overmatch an equal intelligence with a compromised and lowered vitality.
A man's breathing and digestive apparatus (one is tempted to add
muscular) are just as important to him on the floor of the Senate as his
thinking organs. You broke down in your great speech, did you? Yes, your
grandfather had an attack of dyspepsia in '82, after working too hard on
his famous Election Sermon. All this does not touch the main fact: our
scholars come chiefly from a privileged order, just as our best fruits
come from well-known grafts, though now and then a seedling apple, like
the Northern Spy, or a seedling pear, like the Seckel, springs from a
nameless ancestry and grows to be the pride of all the gardens in the
land.

Let me introduce you to a young man who belongs to the Brahmin caste of
New England.

CHAPTER II. THE STUDENT AND HIS CERTIFICATE.

Bernard C. Langdon, a young man attending Medical Lectures at the school
connected with one of our principal colleges, remained after the Lecture
one day and wished to speak with the Professor. He was a student of
mark,--first favorite of his year, as they say of the Derby colts.
There are in every class half a dozen bright faces to which the teacher
naturally, directs his discourse, and by the intermediation of whose
attention he seems to hold that of the mass of listeners. Among these
some one is pretty sure to take the lead, by virtue of a personal
magnetism, or some peculiar