The old Master knows ten times more about this matter and about all the professions, as he does about everything else, than I do.  My opinion is that he has studied two, if not three, of these professions in a regular course.  I don’t know that he has ever preached, except as Charles Lamb said Coleridge always did, for when he gets the bit in his teeth he runs away with the conversation, and if he only took a text his talk would be a sermon; but if he has not preached, he has made a study of theology, as many laymen do.  I know he has some shelves of medical books in his library, and has ideas on the subject of the healing art.  He confesses to having attended law lectures and having had much intercourse with lawyers.  So he has something to say on almost any subject that happens to come up.  I told him my story about my visit to the young doctor, and asked him what he thought of youthful practitioners in general and of Dr. Benjamin in particular.

I ’ll tell you what,—­the Master said,—­I know something about these young fellows that come home with their heads full of “science,” as they call it, and stick up their signs to tell people they know how to cure their headaches and stomach-aches.  Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor.  But if a man has n’t got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has the worse for his patient.

—­I don’t know that I see exactly how it is worse for the patient,—­I said.

—­Well, I’ll tell you, and you’ll find it’s a mighty simple matter.  When a person is sick, there is always something to be done for him, and done at once.  If it is only to open or shut a window, if it is only to tell him to keep on doing just what he is doing already, it wants a man to bring his mind right down to the fact of the present case and its immediate needs.  Now the present case, as the doctor sees it, is just exactly such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was before,—­a snarl and tangle of special conditions which it is his business to wind as much thread out of as he can.  It is a good deal as when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to send for him.  He has seen just such noses and just such eyes and just such mouths, but he never saw exactly such a face before, and his business is with that and no other person’s,—­with the features of the worthy father of a family before him, and not with the portraits he has seen in galleries or books, or Mr. Copley’s grand pictures of the fine old Tories, or the Apollos and Jupiters of Greek sculpture.  It is the same thing with the patient.  His disease has features of its own; there never was and never will be another case in all respects exactly like it.  If a doctor has science without common sense, he treats a fever, but not this man’s fever.  If he has common sense without science, he treats this man’s fever without knowing the