kes the rail-train. Before he gets to the infected
regions he passes crowded rail-trains, regular and extra, taking the
flying and affrighted populations. He arrives in a city over which a
great horror is brooding. He goes from couch to couch, feeling of
pulse and studying symptoms, and prescribing day after day, night
after night, until a fellow-physician says: "Doctor, you had better go
home and rest; you look miserable." But he can not rest while so many
are suffering. On and on, until some morning finds him in a delirium,
in which he talks of home, and then rises and says he must go and look
after those patients. He is told to lie down; but he fights his
attendants until he falls back, and is weaker and weaker, and dies for
people with whom he had no kinship, and far away from his own family,
and is hastily put away in a stranger's tomb, and only the fifth part
of a newspaper line tells us of his sacrifice--his name just mentioned
among five. Yet he has touched the furthest height of sublimity in
that three weeks of humanitarian service. He goes straight as an arrow
to the bosom of Him who said: "I was sick and ye visited Me." Life for
life. Blood for blood. Substitution!

In the legal profession I see the same principle of self-sacrifice. In
1846, William Freeman, a pauperized and idiotic negro, was at Auburn,
N.Y., on trial for murder. He had slain the entire Van Nest family.
The foaming wrath of the community could be kept off him only by armed
constables. Who would volunteer to be his counsel? No attorney wanted
to sacrifice his popularity by such an ungrateful task. All were
silent save one, a young lawyer with feeble voice, that could hardly
be heard outside the bar, pale and thin and awkward. It was William H.
Seward, who saw that the prisoner was idiotic and irresponsible, and
ought to be put in an asylum rather than put to death, the heroic
counsel uttering these beautiful words:

"I speak now in the hearing of a people who have prejudged prisoner
and condemned me for pleading in his behalf. He is a convict, a
pauper, a negro, without intellect, sense, or emotion. My child with
an affectionate smile disarms my care-worn face of its frown whenever
I cross my threshold. The beggar in the street obliges me to give
because he says, 'God bless you!' as I pass. My dog caresses me with
fondness if I will but smile on him. My horse recognizes me when I
fill his manger. What reward, what gratitude, what sympathy an