.
Time was when he could control debates, now he mutters only to himself.
So come, thou divine mortal, for the patient's case is a bad one."

Hippocrates, though he had little faith in these people, went
nevertheless. Now mark, I beg of you, what strange meetings fate may
bring about in this life! Hippocrates arrived just at the time when this
man, who was supposed to have neither sense nor reason, happened to be
searching into a question as to whether this very reason was seated in
the heart or in the head of men and beasts.

Sitting in leafy shade, beside a brook, and with many a volume at his
feet, he was occupied wholly with a study of the convolutions of the
brain; and thus absorbed, as his manner was, he scarcely noticed the
advance of his friend the learned physician. Their greeting was soon
over as you may imagine, for the sage is at all times chary of time and
speech. So having put aside mere trifles of conversation, they reasoned
upon man and his mind, and next fell to talking upon ethics.

It is not necessary that I should here enlarge upon what each had to say
to the other on these matters.

The little tale suffices to show that we may rightly take exception to
the judgments of the mob. That being so, in what sense is it true, as I
have read in a certain passage, that the voice of the people is the
voice of God?

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 6: A city on the shores of Thracia.]

[Illustration]

XXIV

THE ACORN AND THE PUMPKIN

(BOOK IX.--No. 4)

What God does is done well. Without going round the world to seek a
proof of that, I can find one in the pumpkin.

A villager was once struck with the largeness of a pumpkin and the
thinness of the stem upon which it grew. "What could the Almighty have
been thinking about?" he cried. "He has certainly chosen a bad place for
a pumpkin to grow. Eh zounds! Now I would have hung it on one of these
oaks. That would have been just as it should be. Like fruit, like tree!
What a pity, Hodge," said he, addressing himself, "that you were not on
the spot to give advice at the Creation which the parson preaches
about. Everything would have been properly done then. For instance;
wouldn't this acorn, no bigger than my little finger, be better hanging
on this frail stem? The Almighty has blundered there surely! The more I
think about these fruits and their situations, the more it seems to me
that it is all a mistake."

Becoming worried by so much reflection our H