who, with certain points
of similarity to Lawyer Giles, had many more of difference. It was the
village doctor; a man of some fifty years, whom, at an earlier period
of his life, we introduced as paying a professional visit to Ethan
Brand during the latter's supposed insanity. He was now a
purple-visaged, rude, and brutal, yet half-gentlemanly figure, with
something wild, ruined, and desperate in his talk, and in all the
details of his gesture and manners. Brandy possessed this man like an
evil spirit, and made him as surly and savage as a wild beast, and as
miserable as a lost soul; but there was supposed to be in him such
wonderful skill, such native gifts of healing, beyond any which medical
science could impart, that society caught hold of him, and would not
let him sink out of its reach. So, swaying to and fro upon his horse,
and grumbling thick accents at the bedside, he visited all the
sick-chambers for miles about among the mountain towns, and sometimes
raised a dying man, as it were, by miracle, or quite as often, no
doubt, sent his patient to a grave that was dug many a year too soon.
The doctor had an everlasting pipe in his mouth, and, as somebody said,
in allusion to his habit of swearing, it was always alight with
hell-fire.

These three worthies pressed forward, and greeted Ethan Brand each
after his own fashion, earnestly inviting him to partake of the
contents of a certain black bottle, in which, as they averred, he would
find something far better worth seeking than the Unpardonable Sin. No
mind, which has wrought itself by intense and solitary meditation into
a high state of enthusiasm, can endure the kind of contact with low and
vulgar modes of thought and feeling to which Ethan Brand was now
subjected. It made him doubt--and, strange to say, it was a painful
doubt--whether he had indeed found the Unpardonable Sin, and found it
within himself. The whole question on which he had exhausted life, and
more than life, looked like a delusion.

"Leave me," he said bitterly, "ye brute beasts, that have made
yourselves so, shrivelling up your souls with fiery liquors! I have
done with you. Years and years ago, I groped into your hearts and found
nothing there for my purpose. Get ye gone!"

"Why, you uncivil scoundrel," cried the fierce doctor, "is that the way
you respond to the kindness of your best friends? Then let me tell you
the truth. You have no more found the Unpardonable Sin than yonder boy
Joe h