ine, where he filled
the chair set apart to the holy ailments of maternity. Thus, as it were,
he laid his left hand on the rich and his right on the poor; and he was
not left-handed.

Not that his usual attitude was one of benediction. He stood straight up
in his austere pure-mindedness, tall, slender, pale, sharp of voice,
keen of glance, stern in judgment, aggressive in debate, and fixedly
untender everywhere, except--but always except--in the sick chamber.
His inner heart was all of flesh; but his demands for the rectitude of
mankind pointed out like the muzzles of cannon through the embrasures of
his virtues. To demolish evil!--that seemed the finest of aims; and even
as a physician, that was, most likely, his motive until later years and
a better self-knowledge had taught him that to do good was still finer
and better. He waged war--against malady. To fight; to stifle; to cut
down; to uproot; to overwhelm;--these were his springs of action. That
their results were good proved that his sentiment of benevolence was
strong and high; but it was well-nigh shut out of sight by that
impatience of evil which is very fine and knightly in youngest manhood,
but which we like to see give way to kindlier moods as the earlier heat
of the blood begins to pass.

He changed in later years; this was in 1856. To "resist not evil" seemed
to him then only a rather feeble sort of knavery. To face it in its
nakedness, and to inveigh against it in high places and low, seemed the
consummation of all manliness; and manliness was the key-note of his
creed. There was no other necessity in this life.

"But a man must live," said one of his kindred, to whom, truth to tell,
he had refused assistance.

"No, sir; that is just what he can't do. A man must die! So, while he
lives, let him be a man!"

How inharmonious a setting, then, for Dr. Sevier, was 3-1/2 Carondelet
street! As he drove, each morning, down to that point, he had to pass
through long, irregular files of fellow-beings thronging either
sidewalk,--a sadly unchivalric grouping of men whose daily and yearly
life was subordinated only and entirely to the getting of wealth, and
whose every eager motion was a repetition of the sinister old maxim that
"Time is money."

"It's a great deal more, sir; it's life!" the Doctor always retorted.

Among these groups, moreover, were many who were all too well famed
for illegitimate fortune. Many occupations connected with the handling
of cot