ay hair. His companion was too much engrossed
by his paper to heed him. He had a small, elegantly shaped figure,--the
famous surgeon,--a dark face, drawn by a few heavy lines; looking at it,
you felt, that, in spite of his womanish delicacies of habit, which lay
open to all, never apologized for, he was a man whom you could not
approach familiarly, though he were your brother born. He stopped
reading presently, slowly folding the newspaper straight, and laying it
down.

"That is a delicious blunder of the Administration," with a little
gurgling laugh of thorough relish. "You remember La Rochefoucauld's
aphorism, 'One is never so easily deceived as when one seeks to deceive
others'?"

Doctor Bowdler looked uncomfortable.

"A selfish French Philister, La Rochefoucauld!" he blurted out. "I feel
as if I had been steeped in meanness and vulgarity all my life, when I
read him."

"He knew men," said the other, coolly, resetting a pocket set of
chessmen on the board where they had been playing,--"Frenchmen,"
shortly.

"Doctor Birkenshead," after a pause, "you appear to have no sympathies
with either side, in this struggle for the nation's life. You neither
attack nor defend our government."

"In plain English, I have no patriotism? Well, to be honest, I don't
comprehend how any earnest seeker for truth can have. If my country has
truth, so far she nourishes me, and I am grateful; if not,--why, the air
is no purer nor the government more worthy of reverence because I
chanced to be born here."

"Why, Sir," said the Doctor, stopping short and growing red, "you could
apply such an argument as that to a man's feeling for his wife or child
or mother!"

"So you could," looking closely at the queen to see the carving.

Doctor Bowdler looked at him searchingly, and then began his angry walk
again in silence. What was the use of answering? No wonder a man who
talked in that way was famed in this country and in Europe for his
coolness and skill in cutting up living bodies. And yet--remorsefully,
looking furtively at him--Birkenshead was not a hard fellow, after all.
There was that pauper-hospital of his; and he had known him turn sick
when operating on children, and damn the people who brought them to him.

Doctor Bowdler was a little in dread of this future husband of his
niece, feeling there was a great gulf between them intellectually, the
surgeon having a rare power in a line of life of which he knew nothing.
Besides, he