crush the grape.
Be happy, be useful, labor honestly upon the task that is thine, and be
assured that the work will itself achieve its reward. Is it nothing to
relieve pain--to prolong the days of the sickly--to restore health to
the suffering--to soothe the last pangs of the dying? Is it nothing to
be followed by the prayers and blessing of those whom you have restored
to love, to fame, to the world's service? To my thinking, the
physician's trade hath something god-like in it. Be content. Harvey's
discovery was as sublime as Newton's, and it were hard to say which did
God's work best--Shakespeare or Jenner."

"And you," I said, the passion that I could not conceal trembling in my
voice; "and you--what are you, poet, or painter, or musician, that you
know and reason of all these things?"

She laughed with a sudden change of mood, and shook her head.

"I am a woman," said she. "Simply a woman--no more. One of the inferior
sex; and, as I told you long ago, only half civilized."

"You are unlike every other woman!"

"Possibly, because I am more useless. Strange as it may seem, do you
know I love art better than sewing, or gossip, or dress; and hold my
liberty to be a dower more precious than either beauty or riches? And
yet--I am a woman!"

"The wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best!"

"By no means. You are comparing me with Eve; but I am not in the least
like Eve, I assure you. She was an excellent housewife, and, if we may
believe Milton, knew how to prepare 'dulcet creams,' and all sorts of
Paradisaical dainties for her husband's dinner. I, on the contrary,
could not make a cream if Adam's life depended on it."

"_Eh bien!_ of the theology of creams I know nothing. I only know that
Eve was the first and fairest of her sex, and that you are as wise as
you are beautiful."

"Nay, that is what Titania said to the ass," laughed Hortense. "Your
compliments become equivocal, fellow-student. But hush! what hour
is that?"

She stood with uplifted finger. The air was keen, and over the silence
of the house-tops chimed the church-clocks--Two.

"It is late, and cold," said she, drawing her cloak more closely round
her.

"Not later than you usually sit up," I replied. "Don't go yet. 'Tis now
the very witching hour of night, when churchyards yawn--"

"I beg your pardon," she interrupted. "The churchyards have done yawning
by this time, and, like other respectable citizens, are sound asleep.
Let us follow their exa