aces all turned toward the
speaker, like the weathercocks in a northeaster, and I thought it best
to switch off the talk on to another rail.

"How about the doctors?" I said.

"Theirs is the least learned of the professions, in this country at
least. They have not half the general culture of the lawyers, nor a
quarter of that of the ministers. I rather think, tho, they are more
agreeable to the common run of people than the men with the black
coats or the men with green bags. People can swear before 'em if they
want to, and they can't very well before ministers. I don't care
whether they want to swear or not, they don't want to be on their good
behavior. Besides, the minister has a little smack of the sexton about
him; he comes when people are _in extremis_, but they don't send for
him every time they make a slight moral slip--tell a lie, for
instance, or smuggle a silk dress through the custom-house: but they
call in the doctor when the child is cutting a tooth or gets a
splinter in its finger. So it doesn't mean much to send for him, only
a pleasant chat about the news of the day; for putting the baby to
rights doesn't take long. Besides, everybody doesn't like to talk
about the next world; people are modest in their desires, and find
this world as good as they deserve: but everybody loves to talk
physic. Everybody loves to hear of strange cases; people are eager to
tell the doctor of the wonderful cures they have heard of; they want
to know what is the matter with somebody or other who is said to be
suffering from "a complication of diseases," and above all to get a
hard name, Greek or Latin, for some complaint which sounds altogether
too commonplace in plain English. If you will only call a headache a
_Cephalalgia_, it acquires dignity at once, and a patient becomes
rather proud of it. So I think doctors are generally welcome in most
companies."

II

OF THE GENIUS OF EMERSON[10]

Emerson's was an Asiatic mind, drawing its sustenance partly from the
hard soil of our New England, partly, too, from the air that has known
Himalaya and the Ganges. So imprest with this character of his mind
was Mr. Burlingame,[11] as I saw him, after his return from his
mission, that he said to me, in a freshet of hyperbole, which was the
overflow of a channel with a thread of truth running in it, "There are
twenty thousand Ralph Waldo Emersons in China."

[Footnote 10: From an address before the Massachusetts Historical