day; and, perhaps more through careful nursing than active remedies, I
had the happiness to effect his complete recovery. The traveller
proved to be Julius Faber, a physician of great distinction, contented
to reside, where he was born, in the provincial city of L----, but whose
reputation as a profound and original pathologist was widely spread, and
whose writings had formed no unimportant part of my special studies. It
was during a short holiday excursion, from which he was about to return
with renovated vigour, that he had been thus stricken down. The patient
so accidentally met with became the founder of my professional fortunes.
He conceived a warm attachment for me,--perhaps the more affectionate
because he was a childless bachelor, and the nephew who would succeed
to his wealth evinced no desire to succeed to the toils by which the
wealth had been acquired. Thus, having an heir for the one, he had
long looked about for an heir to the other, and now resolved on finding
that heir in me. So when we parted Dr. Faber made me promise to
correspond with him regularly, and it was not long before he disclosed
by letter the plans he had formed in my favour. He said that he was
growing old; his practice was beyond his strength; he needed a partner;
he was not disposed to put up to sale the health of patients whom he had
learned to regard as his children: money was no object to him, but it was
an object close at his heart that the humanity he had served, and the
reputation he had acquired, should suffer no loss in his choice of
a successor. In fine, he proposed that I should at once come to
L---- as his partner, with the view of succeeding to his entire
practice at the end of two years, when it was his intention to retire.

The opening into fortune thus afforded to me was one that rarely
presents itself to a young man entering upon an overcrowded profession;
and to an aspirant less allured by the desire of fortune than the hope of
distinction, the fame of the physician who thus generously offered