they like a gentleman best. Don't throw yourself away. You have a
good presence and pleasing manners. You wear white linen by inherited
instinct. You can pronounce the word _view_. You have all the elements
of success; go and take it. Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue
yourself. You will be useful, at any rate; you may just as well be
happy, while you are about it. The highest social class furnishes
incomparably the best patients, taking them by and large. Besides, when
they won't get well and bore you to death, you can send 'em off to
travel. Mind me now, and take the tops of your sparrowgrass. Somebody
must have 'em,--why shouldn't you? If you don't take your chance, you'll
get the butt-ends as a matter of course."

Mr. Bernard talked like a young man full of noble sentiments. He wanted
to be useful to his fellow-beings. Their social differences were nothing
to him. He would never court the rich,--he would go where he was called.
He would rather save the life of a poor mother of a family than that of
half a dozen old gouty millionnaires whose heirs had been yawning and
stretching these ten years to get rid of them.

"Generous emotions!" I exclaimed. "Cherish 'em; cling to 'em till you
are fifty,--till you are seventy,--till you are ninety! But do as I tell
you,--strike for the best circle of practice, and you'll be sure to get
it!"

Mr. Langdon did as I told him,--took a genteel office, furnished it
neatly, dressed with a certain elegance, soon made a pleasant circle
of acquaintances, and began to work his way into the right kind of
business. I missed him, however, for some days, not long after he had
opened his office. On his return, he told me he had been up at Rockland,
by special invitation, to attend the wedding of Mr. Dudley Venner and