p
them after all! My father's work, I see, doesn't help the very man
himself; it only helps his body--or at best his happiness: it doesn't go
deep enough to touch himself. But yours helps the very man. Yours is the
best after all."

"I don't know," returned Mr Shepherd, thoughtfully. "It depends, I
think, on the kind of preparation gone through."

"Oh yes!" said Willie. "You had to go through the theological classes. I
must of course take the medical."

"That's true, but it's not true enough," said Mr Shepherd. "That
wouldn't make a fraction of the difference I mean. There's just one
preparation essential for a man who would carry about the best sort of
medicines. Can you think what it is? It's not necessary for the other
sort."

"The man must be good," said Willie. "I suppose that's it."

"That doesn't make the difference exactly," returned Mr Shepherd. "It
is as necessary for a doctor to be good as for a parson."

"Yes," said Willie; "but though the doctor were a bad man, his medicines
might be good."

"Not by any means so likely to be!" said the parson. "You can never be
sure that anything a bad man has to do with will be good. It may be,
because no man is all bad; but you can't be sure of it. We are coming
nearer it now. Mightn't the parson's medicines be good if he were bad
just as well as the doctor's?"

"Less likely still, I think," said Willie. "The words might be all of
the right sort, but they would be like medicines that had lain in his
drawers or stood in his bottles till the good was all out of them."

"You're coming very near to the difference of preparation I wanted to
point out to you," said Mr Shepherd. "It is this: that the physician of
men's _selves_, commonly called _souls_, must have taken and must keep
taking the medicine he carries about with him; while the less the doctor
wants of his the better."

"I see, I see," cried Willie, whom a fitting phrase, or figure, or form
of expressing a thing, pleased as much as a clever machine--"I see! It's
all right! I understand now."

"But," Mr Shepherd went on, "your father carries about both sorts of
medicines in his basket. He is such a healthy man that I believe he very
seldom uses any of his own medicines; but he is always taking some of
the other sort, and that's what makes him fit to carry them about. He
does far more good among the sick than I can. Many who don't like my
medicine, will yet take a little of it when your father mixes it wit