“Tom,” said Fred, breaking another long silence, “you’re very tiresome and stupid to-night, why don’t you talk to me?”

“Because this delightful dreamy evening inclines me to think and be silent.”

“Ah, Tom! that’s your chief fault.  You are always inclined to think too much and to talk too little.  Now I, on the contrary, am always—­”

“Inclined to talk too much and think too little—­eh, Fred?”

“Bah! don’t try to be funny, man; you haven’t it in you.  Did you ever see such a miserable set of creatures as the old Esquimau women are at Upernavik?”

“Why, what put them, into your head?” inquired Tom laughing.

“Yonder iceberg!  Look at it!  There’s the nose and chin exactly of the extraordinary hag you gave your silk pocket-handkerchief to at parting.  Now, I never saw such a miserable old woman as that before, did you?”

Tom Singleton’s whole demeanour changed, and his dark eyes brightened as the strongly-marked brows frowned over them, while he replied, “Yes, Fred, I have seen old women more miserable than that.  I have seen women so old that their tottering limbs could scarcely support them, going about in the bitterest November winds, with clothing too scant to cover their wrinkled bodies, and so ragged and filthy that you would have shrunk from touching it—­I have seen such groping about among heaps of filth that the very dogs looked at and turned away from as if in disgust.”

Fred was inclined to laugh at his friend’s sudden change of manner; but there was something in the young surgeon’s character—­perhaps its deep earnestness—­that rendered it impossible, at least for his friends, to be jocular when he was disposed to be serious.  Fred became grave as he spoke.

“Where have you seen such poor wretches, Tom?” he asked, with a look of interest.

“In the cities, the civilized cities of our own Christian land.  If you have ever walked about the streets of some of these cities before the rest of the world was astir, at gray dawn, you must have seen them shivering along and scratching among the refuse cast out by the tenants of the neighbouring houses.  O Fred, Fred! in my professional career, short though it has been, I have seen much of these poor old women, and many others whom the world never sees on the streets at all, experiencing a slow, lingering death by starvation, and fatigue, and cold.  It is the foulest blot on our country that there is no sufficient provision for the aged poor.”

“I have seen those old women too,” replied Fred, “but I never thought very seriously about them before.”