Dora--Theodora--“the gift of God,”--it is good to have names with meanings to them, though people so seldom resemble their names. Her father seems beginning to feel that she is not unlike hers. “She is a good girl, Doctor,” he said one evening, when, after having safely borne moving from bed to his arm-chair, I pronounced my patient convalescent, and his daughter was sent to take tea and spend the evening downstairs, “she is a very good girl. Perhaps I have never thought of my daughters.” I answered vaguely, daughters were a great blessing--often more so than sons. “You are right, sir,” he said suddenly, after a few minutes' pause. “You were never married I believe?” “No.” “If you do marry--never long for a son. Never build your hopes on him--trusting he will keep up your name, and be the stay of your old age. I had one boy, sir; he was more to me than all my daughters.” A desperate question was I prompted to ask--I could not withhold it--though the old man's agitated countenance showed that it must be one passing question only. “Is your son living?” “No. He died young.” This, then, must be the secret--simple and plain enough. He was “a boy”--he died “young,” perhaps about eighteen or nineteen--the age when boys are most prone to run wild. This lad must have done so; putting all the circumstances together, the conclusion was obvious, that in some way or other he had, before his death, or in his death, caused his father great grief and shame. I could well imagine it; fancy drew the whole picture, filling it up pertinaciously, line by line. A man of Mr. Johnston's character, marrying late in life--as he must have done, to be seventy when his youngest child was not much over twenty--would be a dangerous father for any impetuous headstrong boy. A motherless boy too; Mrs. Johnston died early. It was easy to understand how strife would rise between him and the father, no longer young, with all his habits and peculiarities formed, sensitive, over-exacting; rigidly good, yet of somewhat narrow-minded virtue: scrupulously kind, yet not tender; alive to the lightest fault, yet seldom warming into sympathy or praise. The sort of man who compels respect, and whom, being oneself blameless, one might even love; but having committed any error, one's first impulse would be to fly from him to the very end of the earth.