"In every generation of our family since the old fellow who came over from England and founded us on Massachusetts soil, the oldest son has been snatched out of life upon the threshold of his thirtieth year. I carried into college with me an indelible impression of the sudden and distressing death of my father, at that period of his prosperous career, and of the wild cry of my widowed mother when she clasped me to her breast, and prayed Heaven might avert the doom from me. "Everything that philosophy, science, common sense, could bring to the task of arguing me out of a belief in the transmission of this sentence of a higher power to me, has been tried. I have studied, travelled, lived, enjoyed myself in a rational way; have loved and won the one woman upon earth for me, have revelled in her wifely tenderness. "I have tried to do my duty as a man and a citizen. In all other respects, I believe myself to be entirely rational, cool-headed, unemotional; but I have never been able to down that spectre. He is present at every feast; and, although in perfectly good health, I resolved yesterday to put the question to a practical test. I called at the office of an eminent specialist, whom I had never met, although doubtless he knew my name, as I knew his. "Joining the throng of waiting folk in Dr. ----'s outer office, I turned over the leaves of the last number of _Punch_, with what grim enjoyment of its _menu_ of jocularity you may conceive. When my turn came, I asked for a complete physical examination. But the doctor got no farther than my heart before I was conscious of awakening interest on his part. When the whole business was over, he told me frankly that in what he was pleased to call 'a magnificent physique,' there was but one blemish,--a spot upon the ripe side of a peach,--a certain condition of the heart that 'might or might not' give serious trouble in the future. "'Might or might not'! How I envied the smooth-spoken man of science his ability to say these words so glibly! While I took his medical advice,--that, between us, was not worth a straw, and he knew it, and I knew it,--I was thinking of Ethel. I saw her face when she should know the worst; and I became, immediately, an abject, cringing, timorous thing, that crept out of the doctor's office into the spring sunshine, wondering why the world was all a-cold. "Here's where the lash hits me: I should never have married Ethel; I should, knowing my doom, have married no one but some commonplace, platitudinous creature, whom the fortune I shall leave behind me would have consoled. But Ethel! high-strung, ardent, simple-hearted, worshipping me far beyond my deserts! Why did I condemn her, poor girl, to what is so soon to come?