Dr. Benjamin took my apology very pleasantly.  He did not want to be touchy about it, he said, but he had his way to make in the world, and found it a little hard at first, as most young men did.  People were afraid to trust them, no matter how much they knew.  One of the old doctors asked him to come in and examine a patient’s heart for him the other day.  He went with him accordingly, and when they stood by the bedside, he offered his stethoscope to the old doctor.  The old doctor took it and put the wrong end to his ear and the other to the patient’s chest, and kept it there about two minutes, looking all the time as wise as an old owl.  Then he, Dr. Benjamin, took it and applied it properly, and made out where the trouble was in no time at all.  But what was the use of a young man’s pretending to know anything in the presence of an old owl?  I saw by their looks, he said, that they all thought I used the, stethoscope wrong end up, and was nothing but a ’prentice hand to the old doctor.

—­I am much pleased to say that since Dr. Benjamin has had charge of a dispensary district, and been visiting forty or fifty patients a day, I have reason to think he has grown a great deal more practical than when I made my visit to his office.  I think I was probably one of his first patients, and that he naturally made the most of me.  But my second trial was much more satisfactory.  I got an ugly cut from the carving-knife in an affair with a goose of iron constitution in which I came off second best.  I at once adjourned with Dr. Benjamin to his small office, and put myself in his hands.  It was astonishing to see what a little experience of miscellaneous practice had done for him.  He did not ask me anymore questions about my hereditary predispositions on the paternal and maternal sides.  He did not examine me with the stethoscope or the laryngoscope.  He only strapped up my cut, and informed me that it would speedily get well by the “first intention,”—­an odd phrase enough, but sounding much less formidable than cutis oenea.

I am afraid I have had something of the French prejudice which embodies itself in the maxim “young surgeon, old physician.”  But a young physician who has been taught by great masters of the profession, in ample hospitals, starts in his profession knowing more than some old doctors have learned in a lifetime.  Give him a little time to get the use of his wits in emergencies, and to know the little arts that do so much for a patient’s comfort,—­just as you give a young sailor time to get his sea-legs on and teach his stomach to behave itself,—­and he will do well enough.