work of art had for many years been used as a drinking-trough for horses.  A hole has been roughly pierced in it.”  I thought the figure was the most nearly perfect image of heavenly womanhood that I had ever looked upon, and I could have gladly given my whole hour to sitting—­I could almost say kneeling—­before it in silent contemplation.  I found the curator of the Museum, Mr. Soden Smith, shared my feelings with reference to the celestial loveliness of this figure.  Which is best, to live in a country where such a work of art is taken for a horse-trough, or in a country where the products from the studio of a self-taught handicraftsman, equal to the shaping of a horse-trough and not much more, are put forward as works of art?

A little time before my visit to England, before I had even thought of it as a possibility, I had the honor of having two books dedicated to me by two English brother physicians.  One of these two gentlemen was Dr. Walshe, of whom I shall speak hereafter; the other was Dr. J. Milner Fothergill.  The name Fothergill was familiar to me from my boyhood.  My old townsman, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, who died in 1846 at the age of ninety-two, had a great deal to say about his relative Dr. John Fothergill, the famous Quaker physician of the last century, of whom Benjamin Franklin said, “I can hardly conceive that a better man ever existed.”  Dr. and Mrs. Fothergill sent us some beautiful flowers a little before we left, and when I visited him he gave me a medallion of his celebrated kinsman.

London is a place of mysteries.  Looking out of one of the windows at the back of Dr. Fothergill’s house, I saw an immense wooden blind, such as we have on our windows in summer, but reaching from the ground as high as the top of the neighboring houses.  While admitting the air freely, it shut the property to which it belonged completely from sight.  I asked the meaning of this extraordinary structure, and learned that it was put up by a great nobleman, of whose subterranean palace and strange seclusion I had before heard.  Common report attributed his unwillingness to be seen to a disfiguring malady with which he was said to be afflicted.  The story was that he was visible only to his valet.  But a lady of quality, whom I met in this country, told me she had seen him, and observed nothing to justify it.  These old countries are full of romances and legends and diableries of all sorts, in which truth and lies are so mixed that one does not know what to believe.  What happens behind the high walls of the old cities is as much a secret as were the doings inside the prisons of the Inquisition.