to appreciate its value. The grim Doctor's kindness, however, and
gratitude, had been so thoroughly awakened, that he did not feel the
disgust that he probably otherwise might at what seemed the mawkishness
of Colcord's character; his want, morally speaking, of bone and muscle;
his fastidiousness of character, the essence of which it seemed to be
to bear no stain upon it; otherwise it must die.

On Colcord's part there was a good deal of evidence to be detected, by
a nice observer, that he found it difficult to put up with the Doctor's
coarse peculiarities, whether physical or moral. His animal indulgences
of appetite struck him with wonder and horror; his coarse expressions,
his free indulgence of wrath, his sordid and unclean habits; the dust,
the cobwebs, the monster that dangled from the ceiling; his pipe,
diffusing its fragrance through the house, and showing, by the plainest
and simplest proof, how we all breathe one another's breath, nice and
proud as we may be, kings and daintiest ladies breathing the air that
has already served to inflate a beggar's lungs. He shrank, too, from
the rude manhood of the Doctor's character, with its human warmth,--an
element which he seemed not to possess in his own character. He was
capable only of gentle and mild regard,--that was his warmest
affection; and the warmest, too, that he was capable of exciting in
others. So that he was doomed as much apparently as the Doctor himself
to be a lonely creature, without any very deep companionship in the
world, though not incapable, when he, by some rare chance, met a soul
distantly akin, of holding a certain high spiritual communion. With the
children, however, he succeeded in establishing some good and available
relations; his simple and passionless character coincided with their
simplicity, and their as yet unawakened passions: they appeared to
understand him better than the Doctor ever succeeded in doing. He
touched springs and elements in the nature of both that had never been