But this has been the good Doctor's spirit through life. He has taken his troubles lightly, and his labors have sat easily upon him. He has laughed where many would have wept, and he has joked where some would have been serious, if not savage. But that he has done serious work, and that it has been work which has borne fruit, who can doubt? His professional labors are perhaps least known of any of his various activities, but they were many and varied, and not barren of good results. As a single illustration, take his treatise upon "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever," concerning which he has said:-- "When, by permission of Providence, I held up to the professional public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance of poison from one young mother's chamber to another's,--for doing which humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though nothing else good should ever come of my life,--I had to bear the sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe, have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women stir among the ruins." He fought Homoeopathy in the liveliest manner for many years, and latterly threw some hot shot into the ranks of the Allopathists themselves, in an attack upon the excessive use of drugs in medical practice. The Medical Society were considerably excited by this vigorous onslaught, the ripe result of thirty years' study and experience, and disclaimed all responsibility for its sentiments. "Throw out opium," said Dr. Holmes: "throw out a few specifics which a physician is hardly needed to apply; throw out wine, which is a food, and the vapors of ether producing anæsthesia; and then sink the whole materia medica, _as now used_, to the bottom of the sea: the result would be all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the fishes." Of his life-long battle against the Calvinistic theology all his readers know. He has never lost an opportunity of declaring his antipathy to the theology of his fathers, and of pouring sarcasm and ridicule upon it. His father was a Calvinistic divine of the strictest sect; but Dr. Holmes himself has been a life-long Unitarian, and an aggressive one. He owns a pew in King's Chapel and is a regular attendant. Perhaps he is a little of a fatalist. At any rate he always has eyes for-- THE TWO STREAMS. Behold the rocky wall That down its sloping sides Pours the swift rain-drops, blending as they fall In rushing river-tides. Yon stream, whose sources run Turned by a pebble's edge, Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun Through the cleft mountain-ledge. The slender rill had strayed, But for the slanting stone, To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid Of foam-flecked Oregon. So from the heights of will Life's parting stream descends, And, as a moment turns its slender rill, Each widening torrent bends.