I can see her studying in his provincial dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western or Southern barbarisms.  She has learned that haow means what; that think-in’ is the same thing as thinking, or she has found out the meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no single-tongued phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson and at its embouchure, and elsewhere,—­what they say when they think they say first, (fe-eest,—­fe as in the French le),—­or that cheer means chair,—­or that urritation means irritation,—­and so of other enormities.  Nothing surprises her.  The highest breeding, you know, comes round to the Indian standard,—­to take everything coolly,—­nil admirari,—­if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for the same thing.

If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to foot to see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not grown a little older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice, or if your complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then convey the fact to you, in the style in which the Poor Relation addressed the divinity-student,—­go with them as much as you like.  I hate the sight of the wretches.  Don’t for mercy’s sake think I hate them; the distinction is one my friend or I drew long ago.  No matter where you find such people; they are clowns.

The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a lady as her Irish servant, whose pretty “saving your presence,” when she has to say something which offends her natural sense of good manners, has a hint in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood of old Milesian kings, which very likely runs in her veins,—­thinned by two hundred years of potato, which, being an underground fruit, tends to drag down the generations that are made of it to the earth from which it came, and, filling their veins with starch, turn them into a kind of human vegetable.

I say, if you like such people, go with them.  But I am going to make a practical application of the example at the beginning of this particular record, which some young people who are going to choose professional advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for.  If you are making choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if possible, with a cheerful and serene countenance.  A physician is not—­at least, ought not to be—­an executioner; and a sentence of death on his face is as bad as a warrant for execution signed by the Governor.  As a general rule, no man has a right to tell another by word or look that he is going to die.  It may be necessary in some extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last extreme of impertinence which one human being can offer to another.  “You have killed me,” said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told him he was incurable.  He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead in six’ weeks.  If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone, persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought to know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of hope of recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long as life is comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of heaven, or at least of rest, when life has become a burden which the bearer is ready to let fall.