broken limb I saw. If I lost a patient, I felt as if I were going to my own funeral; and every interesting destitute child, I was for taking home, feeding and clothing. Had I followed my early professional impulses, I should have had five hundred in my house to provide for. There are few

We even

things done in this world half as well as we think we could do them ourselves; the hungry starve, the sick are neglected, the convalescent hopelessly put back by harsh and indifferent treatment. When I first came from the country, and walked through the streets of the city, I was inexpressibly pained and exceeedingly shocked at the sight of the first pale, half-starved ragged baby, held in the emaciated arms of its wan-faced ragged mother, and in those thin pauper hands I dropped a half eagle, and passed on, wondering greatly that such a case of forlorn destitution should have stood at that corner so long, empty handed, ragged and hungry, while velvet and diamonds passed by unmoved; but as I walked on, I saw ragged mothers and white faced wailing infants at every corner-and now I find these sad visions are a part of the daily city programme, which every body expects to see as they pass along. think them impudent for standing and shocking our delicate and cultivated vision with their unsightly pauperdom. Only a little kindness would do so much, I would say to myself, and sigh as I theorized about elegant schemes for ameliorating the condition of the race. If I only could get up a phalanstery where all could have equal right and privilege to enjoy life, liberty and happiness. But with a great part of the world, life is half death, liberty half servitude, and the pursuit of happiness only a struggle for to-day's bread and to-morrow's clothes. If some body would, if people would do something, why the world might be set up on its heels and go on right; but I am not people, I am only one man with more wants of my own than I can gratify, so now I meet with interesting cases all the timebut I say to myself there's wrong all around that I can't help. I'll try and mend the broken legs-then they must walk for themselves. I row them over the river of health-they must help themselves up the bank though it is steep enough -the road of life is rough to all of us. We walk it till our feet are sore and bleeding. Struggle, struggle, struggle, rich and poor climbing for something. If you stoop to pick

in

in

up the weak behind you, one loses one's own footing-who'll pick us up. I go home, put on my slippers and don't think about patients-but I must confess there's one little patient at the hospital who has unusually excited my sympathies. For three long months she has been an example of patience. If there ever was a waif on the world's wide sea, she is one-she has a child's innocent helplessness, and a woman's patient self-control-but we must walk faster; the bells are tolling, and we have half a mile yet to walk-we might stop at Dr. Elgood's, but I prefer going on; I feel more at home my own pew. I like to sit in the same seat in church. I am so driven round during the week, I like a few nodes my orbit through which I may pass, and recognize something quietly familiar. Last Sabbath morning, that agent from Constantinople refreshed our imaginations with a whole chapter of statistics, relieved by a few bald, bare, dry facts. If I had had his rare opportunity for gathering information, I I think I could have got up something without bearing so much on the dates. If I only preached once a year to a congregation, I'd try and write one wonderful sermon that wouldn't keep them yawning two hours, and looking at their watches. When the sermon was half through, Mr. John Trap got up and walked out, an exceedingly rude thing for a man to do. In the afternoon we had a sermon about those who down to the sea in ships.' I saw Trap slip a sixpence into the box. That's a pretty close Trap! and we all had an opportunity of giving. These precious opportunities are coming pretty often and we have to put something in the box, it looks so if we don't-if I don't go any other Sunday, I am sure to go when the agents preach. Wouldn't it be a good plan, Richard, to have an agent for the relief of hard-working doctors and bewildered lawyers? We might as well have help as the destitute heathen in Farther India. If we give them more light and they still sin, they sin against more light, and their condemnation will be greater. That law written in their hearts' often puzzles me. Are these myriads of people with souls as precious as our own, and having no Bible, are they all hopelessly lost? We may talk about the utter selfishness of that man who prayed

go

It is the unuttered prayer of half the world. Do we not all therefore practically pray? It's a great deal to discharge one's duties as a husband, father, doctor. If I do this well, how can I do more in this age when we begin housekeeping in the style in which distinguished men lived in the zenith of their prosperity fifty years ago. How are we to meet expenses, pay debts, live generously, give bountifully, walk successfully with men, and humbly before God. If each man would take care of himself and family, the world would wag on well enough, but we have to help some poor stick or other, all the time, or else we are called selfish, and close, and heartless. As to disinterested benevolence, if there is such a thing, it is a century plant, blooming in the heart of humanity once in a hundred years. I can't find it, and I see human nature in its every day and natural face. I saw a half starved beggar child, the other morning on a door step, sharing its last crust with another stranger beggar child; that was the only shadow of a type of it I could find. I've about made up my mind, I've seen so much selfishness, that I shall take good care of myself, and get as healthy, wealthy, and wise as I can."

You can't attend church often, doctor," said Mr. Douglass, "you skillful physicians have few days of rest."

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Yes, I am often professionally engaged, or professionally tired, and many a Sabbath morning the sofa is the best church for me, and as for Dr. Smoothers, he is so often perched up on the frozen heights of theological speculation, or soaring off in some transcendental balloon, overlooking or examining some barren field of conjecture, that he surrounds me with a metaphysical fog, or drags me through a perpetual swamp, as he rings the changes on his infinite series of doctrines. There's no knowing on what wild ocean we'll land if follow him in his thought balloon over the sea of conjecture, and his tone I really dread. I can't see why a man speaking to men from behind a pulpit should talk in a different tone than from behind a chair or table. As somebody who once heard Dr. Smoothers said, there is the same key note at the begining of each sentence, the same monotonous level through the middle, be the middle long or short, the never-failing dactyl and spondee at the end, and so on until seventeenthly. A few words more, and I've done,' and off he starts again on the track of monotones for half an

hour longer. He reminds me of one of those little electromagnetic railcars going round and round on the top of a table, and never getting any where. No accident of feeling, no sense of danger, ever occurs on that track. A thought must be incarnate, have a shape, form, dress, before we give it a reserved seat in the private box of our heart. I like this pictorial preaching, illustrated by familiar images, planted with flowers, studded with stars, where thoughts marshalled on the mind, costumed and vivid, move before the rolled-up curtain of the soul like a bright panorama. Such sermons take us by the hand and talk with us, and years after they'll come again in some lonely hour, and pass in full review. In the open cage of memory such bright winged thoughts nestle and perch; at early morn and still twilight they'll come out like musical birds, and hover and warble in the drooping branches of the shaded soul, singing their matin and vesper hymns, chanting their midnight mass for the repose of the unquiet spirit."

Yes," said Richard, "long elaborate essays, dull learned disquisitions, dry profound researches (not of human life, but of Hebrew lore,) are all in keeping with those old pictures of ministers in square frames, white cravats, Bible open exactly in front, and exactly in the middle of the Bible, fore-finger raised, so that the observer could see, and know and feel in the top of his bump of reverence, that that is a minister. Modern hurried and worried humanity is not always sitting erect in pews, docilely waiting to be admonished by the fore-fingers of men in angular framed notions, in immaculate cravats."

"No," said the doctor, "the police walking about the ecclesiastical walls, may do a vast amount of good, these metropolitan soul police in citizen's dress, taking us by the hand and helping us safe across the muddy, crowded thoroughfare of evil. Why should they stand in life's picturegallery, a series of moveless portraits. In God's great Academy of Design they are living artists, moulding our rough-hewn souls into God's great pattern. Why keep those souls idly rolling over vague conjectures like balls of clay, till we gather not even the moss of veneration or the form of worship. We each of us think in some particular favorite avenue. Into that familiar avenue a spiritual guide may come, walking on before, and not standing at the locked

portals of the soul, ringing gently, and waiting politely to enter at the front door of thought, but stealing through some by-lane or side path, into the soul's cozy sitting room or climbing the winding back stairs of feeling, into the attic of the heart, where are laid away musty bundles of old hopes and old opinions which need to be rummaged and overhauled, well assorted, and laid open for careful inspection and repairing."

Dr. Smoothers," said Douglass, "airs once a week the nice sets of doctrines in his own head, beating them, and turning them over on the line of his sermon, just as the housekeeper beats and airs her furs, to keep out the moths. These good strong doctrines will last long enough without airing them so often. Of all things deliver me from these doctrinal preachers. Crossing the long bridge of forms, why not ford the stream of feeling, stoop under the gate of sympathy, and steal in at the citadel and take by storm of powerful eloquence, the sin beleaguered soul.' I don't know why," continued Richard, "religion must be so gloomily represented. We get the idea that it's a good thing for Sundays, for sick beds, and for the superannuated. If all these christians are really bound for the port of peace, why don't the light of the shining shore break on their faces? This solemn cant, serious drawl, sanctimonious look, if spiritual, was never imparted from the bright spirit-land, never borrowed from a heaven of bliss. Last Sabbath we had a sermon from the text, Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy'-there goes John Trap; he might preach from the text, Blessed are they that take care of themselves, for they shall be taken care of.'"

"The

"I must tell you the anecdote of an elderly Scotch woman I read this morning," said the doctor. Scotch woman gave her son the newspaper to read aloud. The only reading he had been in the habit of hearing was at the parish kirk. He began to read as he had heard the minister read. The good woman was shocked at the boy's profanity, and, giving him a box on the ear, exclaimed, What! dost thou read the newspaper with the Bible twang!' I know much of this professed religion is mere 'Bible twang.' I can't see that Christians live any different from other people. They are just as anxious about the world, and just as absorbed in its cares. They all