ion at
once the most inspiriting and satisfactory; and during the whole of that
period, I am bound to acknowledge the treatment of the baron towards me
to have been most generous and kind. In spite of my own resolutions, I
had attached myself to the professor by a feeling of gratitude, which it
was not easy to extinguish or control. His wish to advance me in the
knowledge and understanding of my profession was so earnest, the pains
he took to communicate the most important results of his own hard-earned
experience so untiring, that, had I not felt a heavy debt of
obligation, I must have been a senseless undeserving wretch indeed. The
baron was manifestly well-disposed towards me, and in spite (it might
have been with so strange a character, by very reason) of our religious
differences, he lost no opportunity of bringing me to his side, and of
loading me whilst there with precious gifts. I attended the professor at
the hospital, at the houses of his patients, in his own private study.
He was flattering enough to say that he liked to have me about him--that
he was pleased with my straightforward character--and with the
earnestness with which I worked. I trust it was not his good opinion
alone that induced me, in opposition to my first resolution, by degrees
to associate with the baron, until at length we became intimate and
almost inseparable friends. I would not acknowledge this to my own
conscience, which happily never suffered me to violate a principle, or
yield an inch of righteous ground. The baron persevered in his attacks
upon our sacred religion. I, grown bolder by long familiar acquaintance,
acted as firmly upon the defensive: and I must do myself the justice to
assert, that the soundness of fair argument suffered no injury from the
light weapons of wit and ridicule which my friend had ever at command.

It was a fine morning in the early spring, and I sat with the baron as
usual in his library. On this occasion I was helping him in the
completion of a series of plates, which he was about to publish, in
connexion with a work on cancer--a book that has since made a great
sensation upon the Continent. The engraver had worked from the
professor's preparations under the eye of the latter; but a few slight
inaccuracies had crept into the drawings, and the baron employed me in
the detection of them. We were both fully occupied; I with the
engravings; he with his lecture of the day--and we were both very
silent, when we