at least limit themselves to certain specialties, and always
have an expert of the other sex to fall back upon. The trouble is that
they are so impressible and imaginative that they are at the mercy
of all sorts of fancy systems. You have only to see what kinds of
instruction they very commonly flock to in order to guess whether they
would be likely to prove sensible practitioners. Charlatanism always
hobbles on two crutches, the tattle of women, and the certificates of
clergymen, and I am afraid that half the women doctors will be too much
under both those influences."

Lurida believed in Dr. Butts, who, to use the common language of
the village, had "carried her through" a fever, brought on by
over-excitement and exhausting study. She took no offence at his
reference to nursery gossip, which she had learned to hold cheap. Nobody
so despises the weaknesses of women as the champion of woman's rights.
She accepted the doctor's concession of a fair field and open trial of
the fitness of her sex for medical practice, and did not trouble herself
about his suggested limitations. As to the imaginative tendencies of
women, she knew too well the truth of the doctor's remark relating to
them to wish to contradict it.

"Be sure you let me have your paper in season for the next meeting,
doctor," she said; and in due season it came, and was of course approved
for reading.

XIII. DR. BUTTS READS A PAPER.

"Next to the interest we take in all that relates to our immortal souls
is that which we feel for our mortal bodies. I am afraid my very first
statement may be open to criticism. The care of the body is the first
thought with a great many,--in fact, with the larger part of the world.
They send for the physician first, and not until he gives them up do
they commonly call in the clergyman. Even the minister himself is not
so very different from other people. We must not blame him if he is
not always impatient to exchange a world of multiplied interests
and ever-changing sources of excitement for that which tradition has
delivered to us as one eminently deficient in the stimulus of variety.
Besides, these bodily frames, even when worn and disfigured by long
years of service, hang about our consciousness like old garments. They
are used to us, and we are used to them. And all the accidents of our
lives,--the house we dwell in, the living people round us, the landscape
we look over, all, up to the sky that covers us like a be