CHAPTER III.
It was some time before I could shake off the impression made on me by the words and the look of that dying man.
It was not that my conscience upbraided me.

What had I done?
Denounced that which I held, in common with most men of sense in or out of my profession, to be one of those illusions by which quackery draws profit from the wonder of ignorance.

Was I to blame if I refused to treat with the grave respect due to asserted discovery in legitimate science pretensions to powers akin to the fables of wizards?
Was I to descend from the Academe of decorous science to examine whether a slumbering sibyl could read from a book placed at her back, or tell me at L---- what at that moment was being done by my friend at the Antipodes?
And what though Dr.Lloyd himself might be a worthy and honest man, and a sincere believer in the extravagances for which he demanded an equal credulity in others, do not honest men every day incur the penalty of ridicule if, from a defect of good sense, they make themselves ridiculous?
Could I have foreseen that a satire so justly provoked would inflict so deadly a wound?
Was I inhumanly barbarous because the antagonist destroyed was morbidly sensitive?
My conscience, therefore, made me no reproach, and the public was as little severe as my conscience.

The public had been with me in our contest; the public knew nothing of my opponent's deathbed accusations; the public knew only that I had attended him in his last moments; it saw me walk beside the bier that bore him to his grave; it admired the respect to his memory which I evinced in the simple tomb that I placed over his remains, inscribed with an epitaph that did justice to his unquestionable benevolence and integrity; above all, it praised the energy with which I set on foot a subscription for his orphan children, and the generosity with which I headed that subscription by a sum that was large in proportion to my means.
To that sum I did not, indeed, limit my contribution.

The sobs of the poor female child rang still on my heart.