How inharmonious a setting, then, for Dr. Sevier, was 3-1/2 Carondelet street! As he drove, each morning, down to that point, he had to pass through long, irregular files of fellow-beings thronging either sidewalk,--a sadly unchivalric grouping of men whose daily and yearly life was subordinated only and entirely to the getting of wealth, and whose every eager motion was a repetition of the sinister old maxim that "Time is money." "It's a great deal more, sir; it's life!" the Doctor always retorted. Among these groups, moreover, were many who were all too well famed for illegitimate fortune. Many occupations connected with the handling of cotton yielded big harvests in perquisites. At every jog of the Doctor's horse, men came to view whose riches were the outcome of semi-respectable larceny. It was a day of reckless operation; much of the commerce that came to New Orleans was simply, as one might say, beached in Carondelet street. The sight used to keep the long, thin, keen-eyed doctor in perpetual indignation. "Look at the wreckers!" he would say. It was breakfast at eight, indignation at nine, dyspepsia at ten. So his setting was not merely inharmonious; it was damaging. He grew sore on the whole matter of money-getting. "Yes, I have money. But I don't go after it. It comes to me, because I seek and render service for the service's sake. It will come to anybody else the same way; and why should it come any other way?" He not only had a low regard for the motives of most seekers of wealth; he went further, and fell into much disbelief of poor men's needs. For instance, he looked upon a man's inability to find employment, or upon a poor fellow's run of bad luck, as upon the placarded woes of a hurdy-gurdy beggar. "If he wants work he will find it. As for begging, it ought to be easier for any true man to starve than to beg." The sentiment was ungentle, but it came from the bottom of his belief concerning himself, and a longing for moral greatness in all men. "However," he would add, thrusting his hand into his pocket and bringing out his purse, "I'll help any man to make himself useful. And the sick--well, the sick, as a matter of course. Only I must know what I'm doing." Have some of us known Want? To have known her--though to love her was impossible--is "a liberal education." The Doctor was learned; but this acquaintanceship, this education, he had never got. Hence his untenderness. Shall we condemn the fault? Yes. And the man? We have not the face. To be _just_, which he never knowingly failed to be, and at the same time to feel tenderly for the unworthy, to deal kindly with the erring,--it is a double grace that hangs not always in easy reach even of the tallest. The Doctor attained to it--but in later years; meantime, this story--which, I believe, had he ever been poor would never have been written. CHAPTER II. A YOUNG STRANGER.