“I only hope that you’ll live to grow up yourself, Ferris,” said his entertainer, “you’ll certainly be an ornament to your generation.  What a boy you are!  I should think you would feel as old as Methuselah by this time, after having rattled from one place to the next all these years.  Don’t you begin to get tired?”

“No, I don’t believe I do,” replied Dr. Ferris, lending himself to this new turn of the conversation, but not half satisfied with the number of his jokes.  “I used to be afraid I should, and so I tried to see everything I could of the world before my enthusiasm began to cool.  And as for rattling to the next place, as you say, you show yourself to be no traveler by nature, or you wouldn’t speak so slightingly.  It is extremely dangerous to make long halts.  I could cry with homesickness at the thought of the towns I have spent more than a month in; they are like the people one knows; if you see them once, you go away satisfied, and you can bring them to mind afterward, and think how they looked or just where it was you met them,—­out of doors or at the club.  But if you live with those people, and get fond of them, and have a thousand things to remember, you get more pain than pleasure out of it when you go away.  And one can’t be everywhere at once, so if you’re going to care for things tremendously, you had better stay in one town altogether.  No, give me a week or two, and then I’ve something calling me to the next place; somebody to talk with or a book to see, and off I go.  Yet, I’ve done a good bit of work in my day after all.  Did you see that paper of mine in the ‘Lancet’ about some experiments I made when I was last in India with those tree-growing jugglers? and I worked out some curious things about the mathematics of music on this last voyage home!  Why, I thought it would tear my heart in two when I came away.  I should have grown to look like the people, and you might have happened to find a likeness of me on a tea plate after another year or two.  I made all my plans one day to stay another winter, and next day at eleven o’clock I was steaming down the harbor.  But there was a poor young lad I had taken a liking for, an English boy, who was badly off after an accident and needed somebody to look after him.  I thought the best thing I could do was to bring him home.  Are you going to fit your ward for general practice or for a specialty?”

“I don’t know; that’ll be for the young person herself to decide,” said Dr. Leslie good-humoredly.  “But she’s showing a real talent for medical matters.  It is quite unconscious for the most part, but I find that she understands a good deal already, and she sat here all the afternoon last week with one of my old medical dictionaries.  I couldn’t help looking over her shoulder as I went by, and she was reading about fevers, if you please, as if it were a story-book.  I didn’t think it was worth while to tell her we understood things better nowadays, and didn’t think it best to bleed as much as old Dr. Rush recommended.”