have wondered at his madness; and should any author desire to utilize
this incident, let him comprehend that the order of Sisters of Charity
admits of its members leaving the ranks by marriage, theirs being a
secular order; so that here are the chances for a story of the freshest
kind. As for the lady doctor in fiction, her advantages would be awful
to contemplate in sickness, when we are weak and fevered, and absurdly
grateful for a newly-beaten pillow or a morsel of ice. But imagine the
awful temptation of having your heart auscultated. Let us dismiss the
subject while the vision of Béranger's Ange Gardienne flits before us as
De Grandville drew her.

I have not now beside me Howells's "Doctor Breen's Practice." It is a
remarkable attempt to do justice to a very difficult subject, for there
are two physicians to handle, male and female, not, I think, after their
kind. "Doctor Zay," by Miss Phelps, makes absurd a book which is
otherwise very attractive. This young woman doctor, a homoeopath, sets a
young man's leg, and falls in love with him after a therapeutic
courtship, in which he wooes and she prescribes.

The woman doctor is, I suspect, still available as material for the
ambitious novelist, but let him beware how he deals with her.



PAIN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.


As I look from my window, on the lawn below are girls at play,--gay,
vigorous, wholesome; they laugh, they run, and are never weary. How far
from them and their abounding health seem the possibilities of such