“Why, you must have some light reading.” “Thank you; but the levity of this is too great altogether.” “You see, I don’t know much about modern novels; so after George Sand, George Eliot, Thackeray, Balzac, and Dickens, I’ve reached the end of my tether, and fall back upon the old standard stock.” “Standard!” repeated Susie. “If this is a standard, I pity the dwarf varieties.” “You borrow your rhetorical figure from your business. It smells of the shop,” said the doctor smiling. “Listen! ‘O Jesus! the very features of Mr. Random! So saying, Narcissus kissed it with surprising ardor, sheds a flood of tears, and then deposited the lifeless image in her lovely bosom.’ Then,” said Susie, explaining, “Mr. Random broke from his concealment, when Narcissus ‘uttered a fearful shriek, and fainted in the arms of her companion.’ Then Roderick, telling his story, says: ‘Oh that I were endowed with the expression of a Raphael, the graces of a Guido, the magic touches of a Titian, that I might represent the fond concern, the chastened rapture and ingenuous blush, that mingled on her beauteous face when she opened her eyes upon me, and pronounced, _O heavens! is it you?_’” The doctor laughed like a boy. “Why,” said he, “I know any quantity of young women who would read that with rapture.” “And would they this?” asked Susie, reading the last sentence of the book. “Ah? I confess that is utter nastiness. Smollet! rot!” “We have just finished Richardson’s _Pamela_, taking turns reading it to each other while sewing,” said Mrs. Buzzell. “I can scarcely believe that it is the same story that, in my mother’s time, was read aloud in the best family circles. Why, I consider it positively indecent.” “You musn’t think, doctor, that I am not glad to have read these books,” said Susie; “they are very interesting, as showing the taste of a century ago. It must be that we are now much more refined than people were then.” “Certainly we are,” said the doctor. “With the invention of the steam-engine and the telegraph, our means of communication with each other all over the world are immeasurably greater, and this is the proximate cause of modern culture. Isolation of the community, the family or the individual favors the savage state, while aggregation tends to stimulate urbanity, generosity, and all our higher faculties. See, therefore, how false the religious teaching that exalted hermits and ascetics of all kinds. Self-torture the church considered praiseworthy, and even to-day we hear of the ‘mortification of the flesh,’ for God is still a being to be propitiated by the agonies of his creatures. Wherever that conception of Nature or God prevails, we may recognize the traces of the savage, and the absence of any real vitalizing faith. The only living faith to-day you will find among those called unbelievers or infidels—men devoted to the discovery of scientific methods. To them Nature is never inimical to man.”