.

BY THE SPRING.
IT was one of the very brightest and breeziest of summer mornings that the Doctor and myself walked homeward from the town poor-house, where he had always one or more patients, and where his coming was always welcomed by the poor, diseased, and age-stricken inmates.

Dark, miserable faces of lonely and unreverenced age, written over with the grim records of sorrow and sin, seemed to brighten at his approach as with an inward light, as if the good man's presence had power to call the better natures of the poor unfortunates into temporary ascendency.
Weary, fretful women--happy mothers in happy homes, perchance, half a century before--felt their hearts warm and expand under the influence of his kind salutations and the ever-patient good-nature with which he listened to their reiterated complaints of real or imaginary suffering.
However it might be with others, he never forgot the man or the woman in the pauper.

There was nothing like condescension or consciousness in his charitable ministrations; for he was one of the few men I have ever known in whom the milk of human kindness was never soured by contempt for humanity in whatever form it presented itself.

Thus it was that his faithful performance of the duties of his profession, however repulsive and disagreeable, had the effect of Murillo's picture of St.Elizabeth of Hungary binding up the ulcered limbs of the beggars.