“Besides, though our libraries are, perhaps, not commonly quite so big as yours, God opens one book to physicians that a good many of you don’t know much about,—­the Book of Life.  That is none of your dusty folios with black letters between pasteboard and leather, but it is printed in bright red type, and the binding of it is warm and tender to every touch.  They reverence that book as one of the Almighty’s infallible revelations.  They will insist on reading you lessons out of it, whether you call them names or not.  These will always be lessons of charity.  No doubt, nothing can be more provoking to listen to.  But do beg your folks to remember that the Smithfield fires are all out, and that the cinders are very dirty and not in the least dangerous.  They’d a great deal better be civil, and not be throwing old proverbs in the doctors’ faces, when they say that the man of the old monkish notions is one thing and the man they watch from his cradle to his coffin is something very different.”

It has cost a good deal of trouble to work the Doctor’s talk up into this formal shape.  Some of his sentences have been rounded off for him, and the whole brought into a more rhetorical form than it could have pretended to, if taken as it fell from his lips.  But the exact course of his remarks has been followed, and as far as possible his expressions have been retained.  Though given in the form of a discourse, it must be remembered that this was a conversation, much more fragmentary and colloquial than it seems as just read.

The Reverend Doctor was very far from taking offence at the old physician’s freedom of speech.  He knew him to be honest, kind, charitable, self-denying, wherever any sorrow was to be alleviated, always reverential, with a cheerful trust in the great Father of all mankind.  To be sure, his senior deacon, old Deacon Shearer,—­who seemed to have got his Scripture-teachings out of the “Vinegar Bible,” (the one where Vineyard is misprinted Vinegar; which a good many people seem to have adopted as the true reading,)—­his senior deacon had called Dr. Kittredge an “infidel.”  But the Reverend Doctor could not help feeling, that, unless the text, “By their fruits ye shall know them,” were an interpolation, the Doctor was the better Christian of the two.  Whatever his senior deacon might think about it, he said to himself that he shouldn’t be surprised if he met the Doctor in heaven yet, inquiring anxiously after old Deacon Shearer.

He was on the point of expressing himself very frankly to the Doctor, with that benevolent smile on his face which had sometimes come near giving offence to the readers of the “Vinegar” edition, but he saw that the physician’s attention had been arrested by Elsie.  He looked in the same direction himself, and could not help being struck by her attitude and expression.  There was something singularly graceful in the curves of her neck and the rest of her figure, but she was so perfectly still that it