couragingly, and had even made some jesting allusions to
the speedy prospect of his once more resuming his place at hearth and
board. Alas! how short-lived were my hopes destined to be! how awfully
was my prophecy to be contradicted.

'No one but him who has himself experienced it knows anything of the
deep and heartfelt interest a medical man takes in many of the cases
which professionally come before him. I speak here of an interest
perfectly apart from all personal regard for the patient, or his
friends; indeed, the feeling I allude to has nothing in common with
this, and will often be experienced as thoroughly for a perfect stranger
as for one known and respected for years. To the extreme of this feeling
I was ever a victim. The heavy responsibility, often suddenly and
unexpectedly imposed; the struggle for success, when success was all but
hopeless; the intense anxiety for the arrival of those critical periods
which change the character of a malady, and divest it of some of its
dangers or invest it with new ones; the despondence when that period has
come only to confirm all the worst symptoms, and shut out every prospect
of recovery; and, last of all, that most trying of all the trying duties
of my profession, the breaking to the perhaps unconscious relatives that
my art has failed, that my resources are exhausted, and, in a word, that
there is no longer a hope--these things have preyed on me for weeks,
for months long, and many an effort have I made in secret to combat
this feeling, but without the least success, till at last I absolutely
dreaded the very thought of being summoned to a dangerous and critical
illness. It may then be believed how very heavily the news I had just
received came upon me; the blow, too, was not even lessened by the poor
consolation of my having anticipated the result and broken the shock to
the family. I was still standing with the half-opened note in my hands,
when I was aroused by the coachman asking, I believe for the third time,
whither he should drive. I bethought me for an instant, and said, "To
the lecture-room."

'When in health, lecturing had ever been to me more of an amusement than
a labour; and often, in the busy hours of professional visiting, have I
longed for the time when I should come before my class, and divesting my
mind of all individual details, launch forth into the more abstract and
speculative doctrines of my art. It so chanced, too, that the late hour
at which