eir conversation is perhaps as well worth reporting as that of
the rest of the company, and, as it was carried on in a louder tone, was
of course more easy to gather and put on record.

It was a curious sight enough to see those two representatives of two
great professions brought face to face to talk over the subjects they
had been looking at all their lives from such different points of
view. Both were old; old enough to have been moulded by their habits of
thought and life; old enough to have all their beliefs "fretted in," as
vintners say,--thoroughly worked up with their characters. Each of them
looked his calling. The Reverend Doctor had lived a good deal among
books in his study; the Doctor, as we will call the medical gentleman,
had been riding about the country for between thirty and forty years.
His face looked tough and weather-worn; while the Reverend Doctor's,
hearty as it appeared, was of finer texture. The Doctor's was the graver
of the two; there was something of grimness about it, partly owing
to the northeasters he had faced for so many years, partly to long
companionship with that stern personage who never deals in sentiment or
pleasantry. His speech was apt to be brief and peremptory; it was a way
he had got by ordering patients; but he could discourse somewhat, on
occasion, as the reader may find out. The Reverend Doctor had an open,
smiling expression, a cheery voice, a hearty laugh, and a cordial
way with him which some thought too lively for his cloth, but which
children, who are good judges of such matters, delighted in, so that
he was the favorite of all the little rogues about town. But he had the
clerical art of sobering down in a moment, when asked to say grace while
somebody was in the middle of some particularly funny story; and though
his voice was so cheery in common talk, in the pulpit, like almost
all preachers, he had a wholly different and peculiar way of speaking,
supposed to be more acceptable to the Creator than the natural manner.
In point of fact, most of our anti-papal and anti-prelatical clergymen
do really intone their prayers, without suspecting in the least that
they have fallen into such a Romish practice.

This is the way the conversation between the Doctor of Divinity and the
Doctor of Medicine was going on at the point where these notes take it
up.

"Obi tres medici, duo athei, you know, Doctor. Your profession has
always had the credit of being lax in doctrine,--thou