I wish I had not said either sex in my certificate.  An academy for young gentlemen, now; that sounds cool and unimaginative.  A boys’ school, that would be a very good place for him;—­some of them are pretty rough, but there is nerve enough in that old Wentworth strain of blood; he can give any country fellow, of the common stock, twenty pounds, and hit him out of time in ten minutes.  But to send such a young fellow as that out a girl’s-nesting! to give this falcon a free pass into all the dove-cotes!  I was a fool,—­that’s all.

I brooded over the mischief which might come out of these two words until it seemed to me that they were charged with destiny.  I could hardly sleep for thinking what a train I might have been laying, which might take a spark any day, and blow up nobody knows whose peace or prospects.  What I dreaded most was one of those miserable matrimonial misalliances where a young fellow who does not know himself as yet flings his magnificent future into the checked apron-lap of some fresh-faced, half-bred country-girl, no more fit to be mated with him than her father’s horse to go in double harness with Flora Temple.  To think of the eagle’s wings, being clipped so that he shall never lift himself over the farm-yard fence!  Such things happen, and always must,—­because, as one of us said awhile ago, a man always loves, a woman, and a woman a man, unless some good reason exists to the contrary.  You think yourself a very fastidious young man, my friend; but there are probably at least five-thousand young women in these United States, any one of whom you would certainly marry, if you were thrown much into her company, and nobody more attractive were near, and she had no objection.  And you, my dear young lady, justly pride yourself on your discerning delicacy; but if I should say that there are twenty thousand young men, any one of whom, if he offered his hand and heart under favorable circumstances, you would

          “First endure, then pity, then embrace,”

I should be much more imprudent than I mean to be, and you would, no doubt, throw down a story in which I hope to interest you.

I had settled it in my mind that this young fellow had a career marked out for him.  He should begin in the natural way, by taking care of poor patients in one of the public charities, and work his way up to a better kind of practice,—­better, that is, in the vulgar, worldly sense.  The great and good Boerhaave used to say, as I remember very well, that the poor were his best patients; for God was their paymaster.  But everybody is not as patient as Boerhaave, nor as deserving; so that the rich, though not, perhaps, the best patients, are good enough for common practitioners.  I suppose Boerhaave put up with them when he could not get poor ones, as he left his daughter two millions of florins when he died.