ered from my mother's talk, and a miniature which represents him as a young cavalry captain in a French regiment.

In the year 1806 he was quartered with his garrison at B, in Thuringia, where he made the acquaintance of my mother's family, and asked her hand in marriage—a stranger, a Frenchman, an enemy! You may conceive that my father's offer was civilly declined by the family. Still, the charm of my mother's beauty and goodness was such that he could not reconcile himself to this refusal. In 1808 he was at Erfurt with the Emperor; obtained a short congé; revisited my mother's family; and so agreeably impressed them all by the cordiality of his manners, and the sincerity of his affection for my mother, that they could no longer refuse their consent, and the marriage was hastily concluded.

My mother accompanied her husband to France, where I was born, at St. Cloud, in 1809.

In 1812 my father's profession again called him to arms. On leaving my mother, he promised her that this campaign should be his last. He kept his word. Amid the snows of the Beresina he perished.

My mother returned with the child to her own relations, and settled in Germany. She never married again, but devoted her widowhood to my education.

The first face to which my eyes were accustomed was a sad one. My mother's grief endeared to me the thought of a father whom I had never known. The story of his early death, and of the sufferings of those who perished amid the frozen steppes in that disastrous retreat of the French army from Russia, I was

soon familiar with. These stories made a profound impression upon my childish mind, to which I trace the passionate longing that impelled me, from my earliest years, to embrace a profession of which the object is to mitigate suffering and combat disease. This was my hobby even in the days when I was only able equitare in arundine longo-to ride a-cockhorse on a stick.

The face of my father on the miniature haunted my imagination in childhood. I seemed to see him perishing, neglected, upon the frozen banks of the Beresina; his dying eye turned on me, and his hand outstretched in vain appeal for help. I persuaded myself that his life might have been saved by the medical care and assistance which in those hideous solitudes it must have been impossible to obtain. My eyes ran over with tears; and when my mother said, "What is the matter with the child?" I flung myself into her arms and said, "Dear mother, when I am a man, let me be a physician."

My mother was the only one of her family who encouraged in me this desire, which strengthened as I grew up. Her relations were scandalized to think that the member of a noble family should voluntarily become the member of a profession noble only in the beneficence of it. However, my own strong resolution, and my mother's gentle firmness, carried the point. A physician I became, and a physician I am; so far, at least, as the certificates of professors, some experience, and an ardent love of science can make

me.

In the Faubourg St. Germain were still living some

of my father's relations. This fact, but yet more the advanced state of medical science in France, decided me to begin my career as a physician in that country. I was on my way thither on the occasion that made me a witness to the events recorded in the preceding chapters.

Between me and those events there was now a space of two years, and between me and the Rhine the mountain chain of Les Vosges.

About this time I resolved to quit my modest chambers on the Quai St. Michel. There, for two years, a very spider of science, I had hung my dingy web over the roofs of the most renowned hospitals in Europe, and dwelt, tanquam in speculo positus, ever ready to pounce upon each "interesting case," as the unsentimental language of medicine designates the most excruciated victims in the great torture-chamber of Disease. My time during these two years had not been wasted. I might now, if I pleased, return home with no meanly stored experience of the infinite domain of medical science. But I could not make up my mind. to quit the most luxurious and refined capital in the world without having devoted some time and attention to what is called Society, in proportion as it is socially exclusive.

Some of my father's family still occupied high positions, and were able to introduce me to those spheres of the Paris world which, ever since the days of the Grande Monarque, have monopolized, almost without interruption, the despotic government of European taste and bon ton.

Know, therefore, oh most dear and much revered

Reader, that my address until farther notice is, Rue, et l'hôtel, de la Paix, au premier, wherein, moreover, nota qua sedes fuerint, replacing cases numberless of specimen bones, gleam cabinets of buhl and porcelain vases. In lieu of lancets and Latin memoranda, invitations, Opera-tickets, and billets-doux strew my table and stuff my looking-glass. The hardly-earned title of "Doctor in Medicine" has disappeared from my visiting cards, and is replaced by a title due only to the accident of birth. I rise late, with the sun of Fashion. I lounge over the dainty breakfast of a delicate dandy. The lightest of phaetons or the neatest of English hacks takes me to the Champs Elysées and the Bois, or else I saunter on the Boulevard arm in arm with some one of the myriad friends-so lightly won, so lightly lost-wherewith that pleasant pavement is besprinkled ever. A dinner in the bow window at the Café de Paris, a stall at the Opera, and three or four soirées in the Faubourg, finish my day of strenuous inertness.

Whereat you shake your honored heads, oh my much disapproving, much respected friends!

Yet grant me a moment of your patience. I am nunquam minus otiosus quam quum otiosus. In pleading my own cause, let me vindicate that of a profession dear to my heart.

The doctor!

Dreary, living memorial, maintained by the sighs of humanity in homage to the Fall of Man!

Doctors, undertakers, and hangmen are beings whose presence society only puts up with because it can not do without them. Nobody wishes to see

much of them. Doctors! pah! ghouls! who remind us that we are nothing but a network of veins, muscles, and nervous fibre! Cynics of the dissectingroom, whose eyes are sold to the contemplation of sickening things, whose minds are made up in the mould of a harsh materialism! Doctors! nightmares of mankind, which endures them with a groan only because each man, as an antidote to prejudice, carries in him a strong dose of superstition, and believes, when his body begins to plague him, that his dear life is in the hands of the leech.

So the doctor is a despot after all, and rules by the fear of death. But society revenges itself. Despotism against despotism.

Let the doctor dare only so much as lift his eyes, in the hope and love of a man's heart, on the daughter of the noble house whose life he has just snatched from the opening grave with an energy and a skill unknown perhaps to science without love, and frigidly you ask for his bill, and sublimely you ring the bell, and honestly you feel that rather to the arms of Death than to the arms of a doctor would you confide the rescued treasure.

I have much considered this.

In exaggeration itself the true measure can be found, since there it must be, otherwise how should it be exceeded?

Something of error I find on either side.

"There must be division of classes and distinction between ranks," says the World. The World says well. He is a fool that would gainsay it; and whoever fights against Prejudice must expect to be worst