"Is her chest affected--does he say?"

"He says not; but I believe he knows no more about the state of her
chest than he does about the other side of the moon. He's a stupid old
fool. He comes here for his fees, and he has them."

"Why don't you call in another, if you are not satisfied?"

"Why, my dear fellow, they're all the same in this infernal old
place. I believe they've all embalmed themselves, and are going by
clockwork. They and the clergy make sad fools of us. But we make worse
fools of ourselves to have them about us. To be sure, they see that
everything is proper. The doctor makes sure that we are dead before we
are buried, and the parson that we are buried after we are dead. About
the resurrection I suspect he knows as much as we do. He goes by
book."

In his perplexity and sorrow, the poor colonel was irritable and
unjust. I saw that it would be better to suggest than to reason. And I
partly took the homoeopathic system--the only one on which mental
distress, at least, can be treated with any advantage.

"Certainly," I said, "the medical profession has plenty of men in it
who live on humanity, like the very diseases they attempt to cure. And
plenty of the clergy find the Church a tolerably profitable
investment. The reading of the absolution is as productive to them
now, as it was to the pardon-sellers of old. But surely, colonel, you
won't huddle them all up together in one shapeless mass of
condemnation?"