upward become palsied.  The doctor retorted that theological students developed a third eyelid,—­the nictitating membrane, which is so well known in birds, and which serves to shut out, not all light, but all the light they do not want.  Their little skirmishes did not prevent their being very good friends, who had a common interest in many things and many persons.  Both were on the committee which had the care of the Library and attended to the purchase of books.  Each was scholar enough to know the wants of scholars, and disposed to trust the judgment of the other as to what books should be purchased.  Consequently, the clergyman secured the addition to the Library of a good many old theological works which the physician would have called brimstone divinity, and held to be just the thing to kindle fires with,—­good books still for those who know how to use them, oftentimes as awful examples of the extreme of disorganization the whole moral system may undergo when a barbarous belief has strangled the natural human instincts.  The physician, in the mean time, acquired for the collection some of those medical works where one may find recorded various rare and almost incredible cases, which may not have their like for a whole century, and then repeat themselves, so as to give a new lease of credibility to stories which had come to be looked upon as fables.

Both the clergyman and the physician took a very natural interest in the young man who had come to reside in their neighborhood for the present, perhaps for a long period.  The rector would have been glad to see him at church.  He would have liked more especially to have had him hear his sermon on the Duties of Young Men to Society.  The doctor, meanwhile, was meditating on the duties of society to young men, and wishing that he could gain the young man’s confidence, so as to help him out of any false habit of mind or any delusion to which he might be subject, if he had the power of being useful to him.

Dr. Butts was the leading medical practitioner, not only of Arrowhead Village, but of all the surrounding region.  He was an excellent specimen of the country doctor, self-reliant, self-sacrificing, working a great deal harder for his living than most of those who call themselves the laboring classes,—­as if none but those whose hands were hardened by the use of farming or mechanical implements had any work to do.  He had that sagacity without which learning is a mere incumbrance, and he had also a fair share of that learning without which sagacity is like a traveller with a good horse, but who cannot read the directions on the guideboards.  He was not a man to be taken in by names.  He well knew that oftentimes very innocent-sounding words mean very grave disorders; that all, degrees of disease and disorder are frequently confounded under the same term; that “run down” may stand for a fatigue of mind or body from which a week or a month of rest will completely restore the over-worked patient, or an advanced stage of a