gly, the ideals of our profession. It seems to me
a very beautiful and wonderful life that is opening up before me,
always to help, to give, to heal. I feel as though I had been
dedicated to some sacred calling, some lifelong service. And service
means brotherhood."

'"_You'll get over that!_" returned the old doctor curtly, yet not
without a certain secret admiration. "_You'll get over that_ when
you've had to engage a lawyer to collect your modest wages for your
uplifting work, the healed not being sufficiently grateful to pay the
healer. When you've gone ten miles in the dead of winter, at midnight,
to take a pin out of a squalling baby's back, why, you may change your
mind!"'

And later on in the same story Myrtle Reed gives us another dialogue
between the two doctors.

'"I may be wrong," remarked Ralph, "but I've always believed that
nothing is so bad that it can't be made better."

'"The unfailing earmark of youth," the old man replies; "_you'll get
over that!_"'

Old Dr. Dexter is quite right. Good or bad, the tendency is to get
over things. Many a man has entered his business or profession with
the highest and most roseate ideals, and the tragedy of his life lay in
the fact that he recovered from them.

Yes, there is nothing that we cannot get over. Our recuperative
faculties know no limit. None of our diseases are incurable. I knew
an old lady who really thought that her malady was fatal. She fancied
that she could never recover. She even told me that the doctor had
informed her that her case was hopeless. She lay back upon her pillow,
and her snowy hair shamed the whiteness about her. 'I shall never get
over it,' she sighed, '_I shall never get over it!_' But she did. We
sang 'Rock of Ages' beside her sunlit grave this afternoon.

V

NAMING THE BABY

Wild horses shall not drag from me the wonderful secret that suggested
my theme. Suffice it to say that it had to do with the naming of a
baby. And the naming of a baby is really one of the most momentous
events upon which the sentinel stars look down. There is more in it
than a cursory observer would suppose. Tennyson recognized this when
his first son was born, the son who was destined to become the
biographer of his distinguished sire and the Governor-General of our
Australian Commonwealth. Whilst revelling in the proud ecstasies of
early fatherhood, he sought the companionship of his intimate friend,
Henry Hallam, the hi