rs being a
secular order; so that here are the chances for a story of the freshest
kind. As for the lady doctor in fiction, her advantages would be awful
to contemplate in sickness, when we are weak and fevered, and absurdly
grateful for a newly-beaten pillow or a morsel of ice. But imagine the
awful temptation of having your heart auscultated. Let us dismiss the
subject while the vision of Beranger's Ange Gardienne flits before us as
De Grandville drew her.

I have not now beside me Howells's "Doctor Breen's Practice." It is a
remarkable attempt to do justice to a very difficult subject, for there
are two physicians to handle, male and female, not, I think, after their
kind. "Doctor Zay," by Miss Phelps, makes absurd a book which is
otherwise very attractive. This young woman doctor, a homoeopath, sets a
young man's leg, and falls in love with him after a therapeutic
courtship, in which he wooes and she prescribes.

The woman doctor is, I suspect, still available as material for the
ambitious novelist, but let him beware how he deals with her.

PAIN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

As I look from my window, on the lawn below are girls at play,--gay,
vigorous, wholesome; they laugh, they run, and are never weary. How far
from them and their abounding health seem the possibilities of such
torment as nature somewhere in life reserves for most of us. As women,
their lives are likely, nay, certain, to bring them a variety of
physical discomforts, and perhaps pain in its gravest forms. For man,
pain is accidental, and depends much on the chances of life. Certainly,
many men go through existence here with but little pain. With women it
is incidental, and a far more probable possibility. The most healthy
will have least of it. Vigor of body is its foe. Thin blood is its ally.
Speaking now, not of the physiological pain, which few escape, but of
the torments of neuralgia and the like, Romberg says, "Pain is the
prayer of the nerves for healthy blood." As the woman is normally less
full-blooded than the man, she is relatively in more danger of becoming
thin-blooded than he.

Moreover, the disturbances which come from the nature of her
physiological processes subject her to larger risks of lessened blood
than man, and hence, for all reasons, she is more likely than he to
become anaemic, and out of this to evolve pain in some shape.

If we see that our girls are not overtasked at the age of sexual
evolution, that the brain is n