ut, "Good heavens, Mr. Thurnall! you do not talk of that
frightful scourge--so disgusting, too, in its character--as a matter
of profit and loss? It is sordid, cold-hearted!"

"My dear sir, if I let myself think, much more talk, about the matter
in any other tone, I should face the thing poorly enough when it came.
I shall have work enough to keep my head about the end of August
or beginning of September, and I must not lose it beforehand,
by indulging in any horror, disgust, or other emotion perfectly
justifiable in a layman."

"But are not doctors men?"

"That depends very much on what 'a man' means."

"Men with human sympathy and compassion."

"Oh, I mean by a man, a man with human strength. My dear sir, one may
be too busy, and at doing good too (though that is not my line, save
professionally, because it is my only way of earning money); but one
may be too busy at doing good to have time for compassion. If while
I was cutting a man's leg off I thought of the pain which he was
suffering--"

"Thank heaven!" said Elsley, "that it was not my lot to become a
medical man."

Tom looked at him with the quaintest smile: a flush of mingled anger
and contempt had been rising in him as he heard the ex-bottle-boy
talking sentiment: but he only went on quietly,

"No, sir; with your more delicate sensibilities, you may thank Heaven
that you did not become a medical man; your life would have been one
of torture, disgust, and agonising sense of responsibility. But do you
not see that you must thank Heaven for the sufferer's sake also? I
will not shock you again by talking of amputation; but even in the
smallest matter--even if you were merely sending medicine to an old
maid--suppose that your imagination were preoccupied by the thought
of her old age, her sufferings, her disappointed hopes, her regretful
dream of bygone youth, and beauty, and love, and all the tender
fancies which might well spring out of such a mournful spectacle,
would you not be but too likely (pardon the bathos) to end by
sending her an elderly gentleman's medicine after all, and so either
frightfully increasing her sufferings, or ending them once for all?"

Tom said this in the most quiet and natural tone, without even a
twinkle of his wicked eye: but Elsley heard him begin with reddening
face; and as he went on, the red had turned to purple, and then to
deadly yellow; till making a half-step forward he cried fiercely:--

"Sir!" and then stopped s