"Doctor! Doctor!" cried a ragged, dirty-faced boy, running breathless into the yard.
"What's the matter, my lad?" said the Doctor.
"Mother wants you to come right over to our house. Father's tumbled off the hay-cart; and when they got him up he didn't know nothing; but they gin him some rum, and that kinder brought him to."
"No doubt, no doubt," said the Doctor, rising to go. "Similia similibus curantur. Nothing like hair of the dog that bites you."
"The Doctor talks well," said the Skipper, who had listened rather dubiously to his friend's commentaries on his story; "but he carries too much sail for me sometimes, and I can't exactly keep alongside of him. I told Elder. Staples once that I did n't see but that the Doctor could beat him at preaching. 'Very likely,' says the Elder, says he; 'for you know, Skipper, I must stick to my text; but the Doctor's Bible is all creation.'"
"Yes," said the Elder, who had joined us a few moments before, "the Doctor takes a wide range, or, as the farmers say, carries a wide swath, and has some notions of things which in my view have as little foundation in true philosophy as they have warrant in Scripture; but, if he sometimes speculates falsely, he lives truly, which is by far the most important matter. The mere dead letter of a creed, however carefully preserved and reverently cherished, may be of no more spiritual or moral efficacy than an African fetish or an Indian medicine-bag. What we want is, orthodoxy in practice,—the dry bones clothed with warm, generous, holy life. It is one thing to hold fast the robust faith of our fathers,—the creed of the freedom-loving Puritan and Huguenot,—and quite another to set up the five points of Calvinism, like so many thunder-rods, over a bad life, in the insane hope of averting the Divine displeasure from sin."
THE LITTLE IRON SOLDIER
OR, WHAT AMINADAB IVISON DREAMED ABOUT.
AMINADAB IVISON started up in his bed. The great clock at the head of the staircase, an old and respected heirloom of the family, struck one.