small but promising capital which clustered about the Battery and
overlooked the Bay, and of which the uppermost boundary was indicated
by the grassy waysides of Canal Street. Even at the age of twenty-
seven Austin Sloper had made his mark sufficiently to mitigate the
anomaly of his having been chosen among a dozen suitors by a young
woman of high fashion, who had ten thousand dollars of income and the
most charming eyes in the island of Manhattan. These eyes, and some
of their accompaniments, were for about five years a source of
extreme satisfaction to the young physician, who was both a devoted
and a very happy husband. The fact of his having married a rich
woman made no difference in the line he had traced for himself, and
he cultivated his profession with as definite a purpose as if he
still had no other resources than his fraction of the modest
patrimony which on his father's death he had shared with his brothers
and sisters. This purpose had not been preponderantly to make money-
-it had been rather to learn something and to do something. To learn
something interesting, and to do something useful--this was, roughly
speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of which the accident of
his wife having an income appeared to him in no degree to modify the
validity. He was fond of his practice, and of exercising a skill of
which he was agreeably conscious, and it was so patent a truth that
if he were not a doctor there was nothing else he could be, that a
doctor he persisted in being, in the best possible conditions. Of
course his easy domestic situation saved him a good deal of drudgery,
and his wife's affiliation to the "best people" brought him a good
many of those patients whose symptoms are, if not more interesting in
themselves than those of the lower orders, at least more consistently
displayed. He desired experience, and in the course of twenty years
he got a great deal. It must be added that it came to him in some
forms which, whatever might have been their intrinsic value, made it