It was a curious sight enough to see those two representatives of two great professions brought face to face to talk over the subjects they had been looking at all their lives from such different points of view.  Both were old; old enough to have been moulded by their habits of thought and life; old enough to have all their beliefs “fretted in,” as vintners say,—­thoroughly worked up with their characters.  Each of them looked his calling.  The Reverend Doctor had lived a good deal among books in his study; the Doctor, as we will call the medical gentleman, had been riding about the country for between thirty and forty years.  His face looked tough and weather-worn; while the Reverend Doctor’s, hearty as it appeared, was of finer texture.  The Doctor’s was the graver of the two; there was something of grimness about it, partly owing to the northeasters he had faced for so many years, partly to long companionship with that stern personage who never deals in sentiment or pleasantry.  His speech was apt to be brief and peremptory; it was a way he had got by ordering patients; but he could discourse somewhat, on occasion, as the reader may find out.  The Reverend Doctor had an open, smiling expression, a cheery voice, a hearty laugh, and a cordial way with him which some thought too lively for his cloth, but which children, who are good judges of such matters, delighted in, so that he was the favorite of all the little rogues about town.  But he had the clerical art of sobering down in a moment, when asked to say grace while somebody was in the middle of some particularly funny story; and though his voice was so cheery in common talk, in the pulpit, like almost all preachers, he had a wholly different and peculiar way of speaking, supposed to be more acceptable to the Creator than the natural manner.  In point of fact, most of our anti-papal and anti-prelatical clergymen do really intone their prayers, without suspecting in the least that they have fallen into such a Romish practice.

This is the way the conversation between the Doctor of Divinity and the Doctor of Medicine was going on at the point where these notes take it up.

“Obi tres medici, duo athei, you know, Doctor.  Your profession has always had the credit of being lax in doctrine,—­though pretty stringent in practice, ha! ha!”

“Some priest said that,” the Doctor answered, dryly.  “They always talked Latin when they had a bigger lie than common to get rid of.”

“Good!” said the Reverend Doctor; “I’m afraid they would lie a little sometimes.  But isn’t there some truth in it, Doctor?  Don’t you think your profession is apt to see ‘Nature’ in the place of the God of Nature,—­to lose sight of the great First Cause in their daily study of secondary causes?”