Bernardus Caryl Langdon

CHAPTER XXXII

CONCLUSION.

Mr. Bernard Langdon had no sooner taken his degree, than, in accordance with the advice of one of his teachers whom he frequently consulted, he took an office in the heart of the city where he had studied.  He had thought of beginning in a suburb or some remoter district of the city proper.

“No,” said his teacher,—­to wit, myself,—­“don’t do any such thing.  You are made for the best kind of practice; don’t hamper yourself with an outside constituency, such as belongs to a practitioner of the second class.  When a fellow like you chooses his beat, he must look ahead a little.  Take care of all the poor that apply to you, but leave the half-pay classes to a different style of doctor,—­the people who spend one half their time in taking care of their patients, and the other half in squeezing out their money.  Go for the swell-fronts and south-exposure houses; the folks inside are just as good as other people, and the pleasantest, on the whole, to take care of.  They must have somebody, and they like a gentleman best.  Don’t throw yourself away.  You have a good presence and pleasing manners.  You wear white linen by inherited instinct.  You can pronounce the word view.  You have all the elements of success; go and take it.  Be polite and generous, but don’t undervalue yourself.  You will be useful, at any rate; you may just as well be happy, while you are about it.  The highest social class furnishes incomparably the best patients, taking them by and large.  Besides, when they won’t get well and bore you to death, you can send ’em off to travel.  Mind me now, and take the tops of your sparrowgrass.  Somebody must have ’em,—­why shouldn’t you?  If you don’t take your chance, you’ll get the butt-ends as a matter of course.”

Mr. Bernard talked like a young man full of noble sentiments.  He wanted to be useful to his fellow-beings.  Their social differences were nothing to him.  He would never court the rich,—­he would go where he was called.  He would rather save the life of a poor mother of a family than that of half a dozen old gouty millionnaires whose heirs had been yawning and stretching these ten years to get rid of them.

“Generous emotions!” I exclaimed.  “Cherish ’em; cling to ’em till you are fifty,—­till you are seventy,—­till you are ninety!  But do as I tell you,—­strike for the best circle of practice, and you’ll be sure to get it!”

Mr. Langdon did as I told him,—­took a genteel office, furnished it neatly, dressed with a certain elegance, soon made a pleasant circle of acquaintances, and began to work his way into the right kind of business.  I missed him, however, for some days, not long after he had opened his office.  On his return, he told me he had been up at Rockland, by special invitation, to attend the wedding of Mr. Dudley Venner and Miss Helen Darley.  He gave me a full account of the