the city and was a patient candidate for the privilege of
setting fractured limbs and administering medicine, somewhat dashed
the expectations of many who conjected that the Grey estate could not
possibly be worth the amount so long reputed, or the principal heir
would certainly not soil his fingers with pills and plasters, instead
of sauntering and dawdling with librettos, lorgnettes, meerschaums,
and curiously-carved canes cut in the Hebrides or the jungles of
Java.

Over the door of that office, where the Angel of Death had smitten his
father thirty-five years before, a new sign swung in the breeze, and
showed the citizens the name of "Dr. Ulpian Grey. Office hours from
nine to ten, and from two to three."

The members of the profession called formally to welcome him to a
share of their annual profits, and collectively gave him a dinner; the
"best families" invited him to tea or luncheon, croquet or "German,"
and thus, having accomplished his professional and social _debut_,
Ulpian Grey, M.D., henceforth claimed and exercised the privilege of
selecting his associates, and employing his time as inclination
prompted.

In the comprehensive course of study to which he had so long devoted
his attention, he had not omitted that immemorial stereotyped
volume--Human Nature--which, despite the attempted revisions of sages,
politicians, and ecclesiastics, remains as immutable as the
everlasting hills; printing upon the leaves of the youngest century
phases of guilt and guilelessness which find their prototypes in the
gray dawn of time, when the "morning stars sang together,"--yea, busy
to-day as of yore, slaughtering Abel, stoning Stephen, fretting Moses,
crucifying Christ. Finding much that was admirable, and more that
seemed ignoble, he gravely and reverently sought to possess himself of
the subtle arcana of this marvellous book, rejecting as equally
erroneous and unreliable the magnifying zeal of optimism and the
gloomy jaundiced lenses of sneering pessimism,--thoroughly satisfied
that it was a solemn duty, obligatory upon all, to study that complex
paradoxical human nature, for the mastery of which Lucifer and Jesus
had ceaselessly battled since the day when Adam and Eve were called
"to dress and to keep" the Garden by the Euphrates,--that heaven-born,
heaven-cursed, restless human nature, which now, as then,--

"Grasps at the fruitage forbidden,
The golden pomegranates of Eden,
To quiet its fever and pain."