egarded it as one regards a beard, or a
waistcoat,--simple signs of the variation of species.

My mother--Heaven rest her sweet soul--did not, that I recall,
obviously oppose me in this view. After the time of the first
moustache she obeyed her son, as she had obeyed her husband.

As has been already said, the profession to which I fell heir failed to
recommend to me a different personal attitude toward the will of
others. My sick people were my pawns upon the chess-board of life. I
played my game with humane intentions, not wholly, I believe, with
selfish ones. But I suffered the military dangers of character,
without the military apologies for them. He whose duty to God and men
requires him to command all with whom he comes in contact should pray
God, and not expect men, to have mercy on his soul.

It is possible, I do not deny, that I put this view of the case without
what literary critics call "the light touch." It is quite possible
that I emphasize it. Circumstances have made this natural; and if I
need any excuse for it I must seek it in them. Whether literary or
not, it is not human to cherish a light view of a heavy experience.

I loved my wife. This, I think, I have sufficiently made plain. I
loved her as I might have discovered a new world; and I tried to
express this fact, as I should have learned a new, unworldly language.
I could no more have spoken unkindly to her than I could vivisect a
humming-bird. I obeyed her lightest look as if she had given me an
anaesthetic. Her love intoxicated me. I seemed to be the first lover
who had ever used this phrase. My heart originated it, with a sense of
surprise at my own imaginative quality. I was chloroformed with joy.
Oh, I loved her! I return to that. I find I can say nothing beyond
it. I loved her as other people loved,--patients, and uninstructed
persons. I, Esmerald Thorne, President of the State Medical Society,
and Foreign Correspondent of the National Evolutionary Association,
forty-six years old, and a Darwinian,--I loved my wife like any common,
ardent, unscientific fellow.

It is easy to toss words and a smile at it all, now. There have been
times when either would have been impossible from very heart-break.
There, again, is another of the phrases to which experience has been my
only vocabulary. My patients used to talk to me about their broken
hearts. I took the temperature and wrote a prescription. I added that
she would be be