I have always been anxious to avoid giving publicity to details of my profession which might harrow the feelings of mankind--than which, I believe, nothing is more easy of accomplishment by those who are, as I am, in the daily exercise of painful operations on the human body. Pain has been gifted to man as an inheritance, so ample, in so many forms and complexions, in so many directions, that we have only to think, and we feel it--we have only to look, and we see it--we have only to speak or act, and we rouse it. Yet so wonderfully are we constituted, that we do not hate it more than we _love_ it; while we are all engaged in the general endeavours to banish it and conceal it, we have such a craving appetite for it, in the second-hand form of narrative, that we gloat over pictures of suffering with the feelings of an epicure, and seek and call for the stimulus of sighs, and groans, and tears, with an avidity only equalled by our desire of personal happiness. A final cause might be traced in this extraordinary feature of the human mind, if we were curious to know the ways of the Almighty, the modes he has had recourse to, to fit us for life, and prepare us for death; but this is not my object, nor, while I continue to draw pictures from life--charged with a moral that may instruct, truth that may edify, or results that may show there is good in evil, and wonderful deliverances from apparently irremediable wo--is it my desire to minister to the mysterious appetite for sorrow, according to its wants, or the abilities which a long experience might enable me to exercise with greater effect than many sensitive minds might approve.