gan formally. "Mrs. Ashleigh presents her compliments," and went on to
thank me, civilly enough, for my attendance the night before, would not
give me the trouble to repeat my visit, and inclosed a fee, double the
amount of the fee prescribed by custom. I flung the money, as an asp
that had stung me, over the high wall, and tore the note into shreds.
Having thus idly vented my rage, a dull gnawing sorrow came heavily down
upon all other emotions, stifling and replacing them. At the mouth of
the lane I halted. I shrank from the thought of the crowded streets
beyond; I shrank yet more from the routine of duties, which stretched
before me in the desert into which daily life was so suddenly smitten. I
sat down by the roadside, shading my dejected face with a nervous hand.
I looked up as the sound of steps reached my ear, and saw Dr. Jones
coming briskly along the lane, evidently from Abbots' House. He must
have been there at the very time I had called. I was not only dismissed
but supplanted. I rose before he reached the spot on which I had seated
myself, and went my way into the town, went through my allotted round of
professional visits; but my attentions were not so tenderly devoted,
my kill so genially quickened by the glow of benevolence, as my poorer
patients had found them in the morning. I have said how the physician
should enter the sick-room. "A Calm Intelligence!" But if you strike a
blow on the heart, the intellect suffers. Little worth, I suspect, was
my "calm intelligence" that day. Bichat, in his famous book upon Life
and Death, divides life into two classes,--animal and organic. Man's
intellect, with the brain for its centre, belongs to life animal; his
passions to life organic, centred in the heart, in the viscera. Alas!
if the noblest passions through which alone we lift ourselves into the
moral realm of the sublime and beautiful really have their centre in the
life which the very vegetable, that lives organically, shares with us!
And, alas! if it be that life which we share with the vegetable, that
can cloud, obstruct, suspend, annul that life centred in the brain,
which we share with every being howsoever angelic, in every star
howsoever remote, on whom the Creator bestows the faculty of thought!

CHAPTER XII.

But suddenly I remembered Mrs. Poyntz. I ought to call on her. So I
closed my round of visits at her door. The day was then far advanced,
and the servant politely informed me that Mrs. Poynt