Now if this young man once got into the wide streets, he would sweep them clear of his rivals of the same standing; and as I was getting indifferent to business, and old Dr. Kilham was growing careless, and had once or twice prescribed morphine when he meant quinine, there would soon he an opening into the Doctors’ Paradise,—­the streets with only one side to them.  Then I would have him strike a bold stroke,—­set up a nice little coach, and be driven round like a London first-class doctor, instead of coasting about in a shabby one-horse concern and casting anchor opposite his patients’ doors like a Cape-Ann fishing-smack.  By the time he was thirty, he would have knocked the social pawns out of his way, and be ready to challenge a wife from the row of great pieces in the background.  I would not have a man marry above his level, so as to become the appendage of a powerful family-connection; but I would not have him marry until he knew his level,—­that is, again, looking at the matter in a purely worldly point of view, and not taking the sentiments at all into consideration.  But remember, that a young man, using large endowments wisely and fortunately, may put himself on a level with the highest in the land in ten brilliant years of spirited, unflagging labor.  And even to stand at the very top of your calling in a great city is something,—­that is, if you like money and influence, and a seat on the platform at public lectures, and gratuitous tickets to all sorts of places where you don’t want to go, and, what is a good deal better than any of these things, a sense of power, limited, it may be, but absolute in its range, so that all the Caesars and Napoleons would have to stand aside, if they came between you and the exercise of your special vocation.

That is what I thought this young fellow might have come to; and now I have let him go off into the country with my certificate, that he is fit to teach in a school for either sex!  Ten to one he will run like a moth into a candle, right into one of those girls’-nests, and get tangled up in some sentimental folly or other, and there will be the end of him.  Oh, yes! country doctor,—­half a dollar a visit,—­ride, ride, ride all day,—­get up at night and harness your own horse,—­ride again ten miles in a snow-storm,—­shake powders out of two phials, (pulv. glycyrrhiz., pulv. gum. acac. aa:  partes equates,)—­ride back again, if you don’t happen to get stuck in a drift,—­no home, no peace, no continuous meals, no unbroken sleep, no Sunday, no holiday, no social intercourse, but one eternal jog, jog, jog, in a sulky, until you feel like the mummy of an Indian who had been buried in the sitting posture, and was dug up a hundred years afterwards!  “Why didn’t I warn him about love and all that nonsense?” Why didn’t I tell him he had nothing to do with it, yet awhile?  Why didn’t I hold up to him those awful examples I could have cited, where poor young fellows that could just keep themselves afloat have hung a matrimonial millstone round their necks, taking it for a life-preserver?