"'Liberality,'" you may say: "True, there should be liberality in this
eternal world. Individually we _are_ liberal--we _are_ gentlemen; but it
is different with us when you take us as a body. I am for harmony. I
admit that at our meetings we do sometimes fight like very devils--life
is a conflict, anyway. Sir, the country is full of cursed heresies and
growing schisms.--But let me ask--not the doctor here, whom I respect
for his immense learning and Cyclopsian (I mean large--not single-eyed)
wisdom--what _his_ remedy would be? I ask you, sir, not him."

Here Doctor Castleton stepped close to my side, and speaking into my ear
in a ghastly whisper, said, "The ass isn't Regular!" He then drew back,
and looked at me as if expecting astonishment on my part.

I then exchanged a few words with Bainbridge, and informed Castleton of
the result. "Ah, ha--ah, ha--indeed," he said, with as near an approach
to sarcasm as was possible with him. "So my learned young friend thinks
that an organ--the liver--weighing nearly four pounds is to be moved
with a hundredth of a drop of--of--anything! Damn it, sir, am I awake?"

"Ask Doctor Castleton, sir, what portion of a grain of small-pox virus
it would require to disseminate over a whole county, if not checked, a
dread disease? Ask him from what an oak-tree grows?"

"Ask him," said Castleton, "how long it takes an acorn to act. In this
case we require celerity of action--force and penetration."

"Ask him," said Bainbridge, "if the solar rays have celerity, and force,
and penetration; and how much they weigh. It requires fine shot to bring
down the essence of a disease----"