"Mrs. Clemens," said Rich, "are you willing I should clear out the old harness-room, and make a fire there occasionally?"
"What for, Mr. Richardson? If you want more room in the house you can have it. It will certainly be more comfortable than the barn; besides, I am afraid you will take cold."
"Indeed, Mrs. Clemens, I need not hesitate to tell a lady of your respect for and appreciation of the medical profession, that as I proceed in my studies, I shall want to dissect and experiment upon the bodies of animals. You know that, although the courts and the community are ever ready to prosecute a physician to the extent of the law for a mistake in setting a bone, they throw every obstacle in the way of his obtaining any accurate knowledge of the machine he is expected to repair." The law in respect to this matter was more stringent then than at present.
"But, Mr. Richardson, if you should lose a mother, sister, or dear friend,—Mr. Perkins, for instance,—and had placed them in the earth, with all the respect nature dictates, could you bear to feel that they were taken from the grave, exposed upon a table, and cut to pieces by students smoking cigars, and laughing, and jesting, as though to fit and harden them for their profession by driving every spark of feeling and humanity out of their bosoms?"
"No, I could not. I don't believe, however, that there is the least necessity of this hardening process you have referred to; if I believed that, by devoting myself to the study of medicine, I should lose one particle of kindly feeling that I now possess, should harden my heart and curtail my sympathies, or change in any respect, except in obtaining self-command that I might discharge more efficiently my duty, I would relinquish study and go back to the anvil to-morrow. If a doctor is rough and unfeeling, it is to be attributed to his natural temper, and want of culture, not to his profession."
"Then I suppose you are just the one who ought to be a doctor, though I think it is strange that you should choose that profession. As I was telling Mrs. Merrill the other day, I observed you was so sensitive you never could do some of those dreadful things doctors were obliged to perform. But as for the harness-room, you may do whatever you like with it; there's a padlock in the house belongs to the outside door, and a key to the lock on the closet. If there is anything there worth saving, put it in the loft, and any old rubbish you can burn up."
"But the wood, I will pay for that."
"By no means, there's wood enough."
After clearing out the place, and cleansing it thoroughly, Rich made a table, and put iron rings into it, in order that he might fasten any animal that he wished to operate upon. He then procured buckles and waxed ends, and from the boot of the old chaise made straps of different lengths for the same purpose, and put a lock on the door in lieu of the padlock. As the stern, patient smith of the wilderness, amid the melancholy moan of pine forests, and the roar of the stream, wrought out by sheer pluck and perseverance, a mechanical trade, so his earnest grandson, completely absorbed in his chosen pursuit, strove to verify, by experiment upon the bodies of such animals as he could procure, the theories he studied.
In short, under the intoxication of a dominant impulse, he did things that, had they come to the knowledge of Mrs. Clemens, she would no longer have doubted of his adaptedness to the medical profession on the score of sensitiveness; so impervious to emotion in certain directions will an absorbing idea render a person otherwise most impressible.