“Pardon me, I did not forget; but I thought I must take that with a certain margin, as I am compelled to do much that my women patients tell me; but I see I must make you an exception, and the result is that my treatment can do you no good. You need more excitement—a larger life. While you live such a lonely way, medicines are of little use. You see the doctor is a humbug, more or less, and must be until he can prescribe changes in the social conditions as well as of diet and climate. Anyway considered, doctoring with drugs is more the business of the charlatan than of the true scientist. The longer I live the more I see the folly of patching up the stomach and the liver when the true disease is in the soul.” “Soul! why, doctor, I was afraid you did not believe in the soul.” “But I do, only you Christians and spiritualists, so called, have such a beastly material conception of soul that you can scarcely understand the scientific faith. Be sure that I believe in the immortality of soul, but I know that structure corresponds to function; that is the first law of nature. Now the soul, as you conceive it, is not a spiritual conception, but some kind of organization—a ghost, in short, having functions, but the Devil himself cannot define its structure.” “Well, I am not a scientific person, doctor, so I will not pretend I know much; but I think I know that the only way to be happy is to keep as near to Christ as we can.” After quite a long pause, during which doctor and patient reached the little veranda porch of Mrs. Buzzell’s home, she added, “Shall I keep on taking that cardiac mixture, or would you recommend something else?” “Nothing else,” he said, holding her hand a moment, “only a good-night kiss from your doctor.” This he added gravely, and then pressed his grizzly moustache lightly first upon one and then the other of his patient’s faded cheeks. The prescription was quite new, though the doctor had often kissed her forehead after sitting by her bed, talking to her while holding her hand. “Is this a general treatment?” asked Mrs. Buzzell good-humoredly; “or am I an exception?”