Out of these materials how easy could it be to add so much, and so many more darker shades to the picture. We have no great wish to lay them on either thick or thin--the mind will paint for itself, as rises the contemplation: the family doctor hanging over his patient with professional sympathy, and perhaps something finer, dreaming the while of a _post-obit_ fee, in addition to that paid for his skill to cure--the sexton clapping down the sod over a companion who had often set the table in a roar, in which the grave official had joined, and meditating a resurrection through his means in the morning--the relative who had even got the length of tears, dropping them on the pale face of an old friend, all the while that he meditated a sale of the body. But it is true that the annals of the period justified all these grim pictures. Many will still recollect the young Irish doctor who went in the Square under the name of the "Captain"--a man of such infinite spirits, always in a flow of his country's humour, that you could not suppose that there was time or room in his mind for a little smooth pool to reflect a passing cloud of sadness. In his native town he drove a great trade for the Edinburgh halls--his largest contribution being laid on the graveyard of his native town. And surely, in his case, we would have thought the Chinese system of paying a doctor, only in the case of recovery, would have been an example of Irish prudence. Nay, so many were the barrels, with a peculiar species of _contenu_, he sent by Leith, that it was difficult to avoid the suspicion that the rollicking son of Erin had a faith in his medicines stronger than the hope which illumined the faces of his patients. These barrels of the "Captain" were quite well known, not only to the skippers, but the porters about the pier, ay, even the carters who made the final transport; and here, again, mammon was the seducing spirit. It was only when he came over for his large accumulated payments that he was seen in the hall, where his jokes and immeasurable laughter might have made those quiet heads on the tables rise to get a look of their once sympathising surgeon. Nor, in the consideration of the students, was his laughter unjustified by his jokes; as once where, pointing to a certain table, he apostrophised the burden it carried--"Ah, Misthress O'Neil! did I spare the whisky on you, which you loved so well,--and didn't you lave me a purty little sum to keep the resurrectionists away from you,--and didn't I take care of you myself? and by J----s you are there, and don't thank me for coming over to see you;" or when, in the same brogue, he told them that, not long before his coming over, he had, for lack of "the thing" in his own town, taken a car and rode to a neighbouring village, where he got precisely what he wanted; that, on returning at a rapid rate with his charge, he met the mother of it with the words in her mouth--