doctor and his sister turned to the other bed. toga, and why could not Dr. Lagrange see him at once? Every one kept him "Major Morton, I believe?" said the waiting, and he supposed Mrs. Morton doctor. "Yes, John Morton, Fifth Pennsylvania Reserves. Confound the bed, doctor, how hard it is! Are all your beds like this? It's all over hummocks, like a damson pie!" The doctor felt that somehow he was accused. "I never noticed it," said Wendell. "The beds are not complained of." "But I complain of it. However, I shall get used to it, I suppose. There must be at least six feathers in the pillow!" "It is n't feather. It is hair," remarked Miss Wendell. "That's much cooler, you know." "Cooler!" replied the major. "It's red hot. Everything is red hot! But I suppose it is myself. Confound the flies! I wonder what the deuce they 're for! Could n't I have a net?" "Flies?" reflected Miss Wendell. "They must be right - but - but they are dirty!" She wisely, however, kept silence as to the place and function of flies in nature. "I will ask for a net," she said. "Oh, yes, do," he returned; "that's a good woman." "I am not a good woman," exclaimed Miss Wendell, "but I will ask about the net." "Oh, but you will be, if you get me a net," continued the patient. "And ask, too, please, about my wife. to be in the city to-day." She was He spoke like one used to command, and as if his discomforts were to receive instant attention. In the field no man was easier pleased, or less exacting about the small comforts of camp, but the return to a city seemed to let loose all the habitual demands of a life of ease. Dr. Wendell promised to see about the lady. Mrs. Morton was to come from Sara would keep him waiting, like every one else. At length Miss Wendell said, "My brother has his duties here, sir. I think I can go and see about it. You must needs feel troubled concerning your wife. As you look for her to-day, I might meet her at the depot, because, if, as you have said, she does not know to what hospital you have been taken, she will be in great distress, great distress, I should think." "Yes, great distress," repeated Major Morton, with an odd gleam of amusement on his brown face. "But how will you know her? Stop! Yes she telegraphed me she would come by an afternoon train to-morrow, and I am a day too soon, you see." "There are only three trains," said Miss Wendell, looking at the time-table in an evening paper, which an orderly had been sent to find. "I can go to them all, if you wish. I do not mind taking trouble for our wounded soldiers. It is God's cause, sir. Don't let it worry you." Morton's mustache twitched with the partly controlled merriment of the hidden lips beneath it. There was, for his nature, some difficulty in seeing relations between a large belief and small duties. There was the Creator, of whom he thought with vagueness, and who certainly had correct relations to Christ Church; but what had he to do with a woman going to look for another woman at a depot? "You might tell my sister, major, what Mrs. Morton is like," suggested Dr. Wendell. "Like?" returned Morton, rather wearily, and then again feebly amused at the idea of describing his wife. "Like, like? By George, that's a droll idea!" Most of us, in fact, would have a little trouble in accurately delineating for a stranger the people familiar to us, and would, if abruptly required to do so, be apt to hesitate, or, like the major, to halt altogether. "Like?" he again said. "God bless me! why, I could n't describe myself!" "But her gown?" said Miss Wendell, with ingenuity, and remembering, with a sense of approval of her own cleverness, that she herself, having but two gowns, might through them, at least, be identified. Major Morton laughed. "Gown? She may have had twenty gowns since I saw her. It is quite eighteen months. You might look for a tall woman, rather simply dressed, handsome woman, I may say. Small boy with her, a maid, and no end of bundles, bags, rugs, - all all that sort of thing. You must know." Miss Wendell was not very clear in her own mind that she did know, but, seeing that the wounded man was tired, accepted his description as sufficient, and said cheerfully, "No doubt I shall find her. Good-night." "Beg pardon, doctor, but I didn't quite catch your name," said the patient. 66 "Confound the fellow, and his evening round!" growled the major under his mustache. "I wish he had my leg, or I had him in my regiment." But happy in the assertion of his professional position, Dr. Wendell had rejoined his sister, the more content because he felt that she had relieved him of the trouble of finding the wife of the officer. Like many people who, intellectually, are active enough, he disliked physical exertion. At times, indeed, he mildly reproached himself for the many burdens he allowed his sister to carry, and yet failed to see how largely she was the power which supplemented his own nature by urging him along with an energy which often enough distressed him, and as often hurt his self-esteem. There are in life many of these partnerships: a husband with intellect enough, owing the driving power to a wife's sense of duty, or to her social ambitions; a brother with character, using, halfunconsciously, the generous values of a sister's more critical intelligence. When one of the partners in these concerns dies, the world says, "Oh, yes, he is quite used up by this death. Now he has lost all his activity. Poor fellow, My name is Wendell, Dr. Wen- he must have felt it very deeply." dell," returned the doctor. "Thanks; and one thing more, doctor: send me some opium, and soon, too. I am suffering like the devil!" "How little he knows!" thought Miss Wendell, with a grave look and an inward and satisfactory consciousness that her beliefs enabled her at least to entertain a higher and more just appreciation in regard to the improbable statement he had made. "Yes," replied the doctor. "We'll see about it." He had a feeling, not quite uncommon in his profession, that such suggestions in regard to treatment were in a measure attacks on his own prerogative of superior intelligence. We shall see," he said, "when we make the evening round." II. Moods are the climates of the mind. They warm or chill resolves, and are in turn our flatterers or our cynical satirists. With some people, their moods are fatal gifts of the east or the west wind; while with others, especially with certain women, and with men who have feminine temperaments, they come at the call of a resurgent memory, of a word that wounds, of a smile at meeting, or at times from causes so trivial that while we acknowledge their force we seek in vain for the reasons of their domination. With Wendell, the moods to which he was subject made a good deal of the sun and shade of life. He was without much steady capacity for resistance, and yielded with a not incurious attention to his humors, being either too weak or too indifferent to battle with their influence, and in fact having, like many persons of intelligence, without vigor of character, a pleasure in the belief that he possessed in a high degree individualities, even in the way of what he knew to be morbid. One of these overshadowing periods of depression was brought on by his sister's mild remonstrance concerning his want of punctuality, and by the reproof of his superior, Dr. Lagrange, or, as he much preferred to be addressed, Major Lagrange, such being his titular rank on the army register. Miss Wendell had gone home first, and Wendell was about to follow her, when he was recalled by an orderly, who ran after him to tell him of the sudden death of one of his patients. Death was an incident of hospital life too common to excite men, in those days of slaughter; but it so chanced that, as regards this death, Wendell experienced a certain amount of discomfort. A young officer had died abruptly, from sudden exertion, and Wendell felt vaguely that his own mood had prevented him from giving the young man such efficient advice as might have made him more careful. The thought was not altogether agreeable. "I ought never to have been a doctor," groaned Wendell to himself. "Everything is against me." Then, seeing no criticism in the faces of the nurses, he gave the usual orders in case of a death, and, with a last glance at the moveless features and open eyes of the dead, left the ward. There is probably no physician who cannot recall some moment in his life when he looked with doubt and trouble of mind on the face of death; but for the most part his is a profession carried on with uprightness of purpose and habit ual watchfulness, so that it is but very rarely that its practitioners have as just reason for self-reproach as Wendell had. Very ill at ease with himself, he walked towards the station, where, having missed his train, he had to wait for half an hour. Sitting here alone, he soon reasoned himself into his usual state of self-satisfied calm. It was after all a piece of bad fortune, and attended with no consequences to himself; one of many deaths, the every-day incidents of a raging war and of hospital life. Very likely it would have happened soon or late, let him have done as he might. A less imaginative man would have suffered less; a man with more conscience would have suffered longer, and been the better for it. At the station in Germantown he lit his pipe, and, soothed by its quieting influence, walked homeward to his house on Main street. He was rapidly coming to a state of easier mind, under the effect of the meerschaum's subtle influence upon certain groups of ganglionic nerve cells deep in his cerebrum, when, stumbling on the not very perfect pavements of the suburban village, he dropped his pipe, and had a shock of sudden misery as he saw it by the moonlight in fragments; a shock which, as he reflected with amazement a moment later, seemed to him nay, which was quite as great as that caused by the death of his patient, an hour before! He stood a moment, overcome with the calamity, and then walked on slowly, with an abrupt sense of disturbing horror at the feeling that the pipe's material wholeness was to him, for a moment, as important as the young officer's life. The people who live in a harem of sentiments are very apt to lose the wholesome sense of relation in life, so that in their egotism small things become large, and as often large things small. They are apt, as Wendell was to call to their aid and comfort whe ever power of casuistry they possess to support their feelings, and thus by degrees habitually weaken their sense of moral perspective. It may seem a slight thing to dwell upon, but for self-indulgent persons there is nothing valueless in their personal belongings, and the train of reflection brought by this little accident was altogether characteristic. Thrown back by this trifle into his mood of gloom, he reached his own house, and saw through the open windows his sister's quiet face bent over her sewingmachine, which was humming busily. About two years before this date, Wendell and his sister had left the little village on Cape Cod to try their fortunes elsewhere. These two were the last descendants of a long line of severely religious divines, who had lived and preached at divers places on the Cape. But at last one of them Wendell's father became the teacher of a normal school, and died in late middle life, leaving a few thousand dollars to represent the commercial talent of some generations of Yankees whose acuteness had been directed chiefly into the thorny tracks of biblical exegesis. His son, a shy, intellectual lad, had shown promise at school, and only when came the practical work of life exhibited those defects of character which had been of little moment so long as a good memory and mental activity were the sole requisites. Persistent energy, sufficing to give the daily supply of power needful for both the physical and mental claims of any exacting profession, were lacking. In a career at school or college it is possible to "catch up," but in the school of life there are no examinations at set intervals, and success is usually made up of the sum of happy uses of multiplied fractional opportunities. His first failure was as a teacher, one of the most self-denying of avocations. Then he studied medicine, and was so carried away by the intellectual enthusiasm it aroused in him that could he have retired into some quiet college nook, as a student of physiology or pathology, he would probably have attained a certain amount of reputation, because in such a career irregular activity is less injurious. Want of means, however, or want of will to endure for a while some necessary privations, inclined him to accept the every-day life and trials of a prac ticing physician in the town where he was born. The experiment failed. There was some want in the young man which interfered with success at home, so that the outbreak of the war found him ready, as were many of his class, to welcome the chances of active service as a doctor in the field. A rough campaign in West Virginia resulted very soon in his suddenly quitting the army, and finding his way to Philadelphia, where his sister joined. him. She readily accepted his excuse of ill health as a reason for his leaving the service, and they finally decided to try their luck anew in the Quaker town. Miss Wendell brought with her the few thousand dollars which represented her father's life-long savings. Yielding to her better judgment, the doctor found a home in Germantown, within a few miles of Philadelphia, as being cheaper than the city, and in the little, longdrawn-out town which Pastorius founded they settled themselves, with the conviction on Ann's part that now, at last, her brother's talents would find a fitting sphere, and the appreciation which ignorant prejudice had denied him elsewhere. What more the severe, simple, energetic woman of limited mind thought of her brother, we may leave this, their life-tale, to tell. The house they rented for but a moderate sum was a rather large two-story building of rough gray micaceous stone, with a front lit by four windows. Over the door projected an old-fashioned penthouse, and before it was what is known in Pennsylvania as a stoop; that is, a large, flat stone step, with a bench on either side. Across the front of the house an ivy had year by year spread its leaves, until it hung in masses from the eaves, and mingled on the hipped roof with the Virginia creeper and the trumpet vine, which grew in the garden on one side of the house, and, climbing to the gable, mottled in October the darker green with crimson patches. Behind the house a half acre of garden was gay with dahlias, sunflowers, and hollyhocks, with a bit of pasture farther back, for use, if needed. The house had been, in the past, the dwelling of a doctor, who had long ceased to practice, and to it the sister and brother had brought the old furniture from a home on Cape Cod, in which some generations of Puritan divines had lived, and in which they had concocted numberless sermons of inconceivable length. Notwithstanding his sister's economic warnings, the doctor had added from time to time, as his admirable taste directed, many books, a few engravings, and such other small ornaments as his intense love of color suggested. As he now entered the sitting-room, the general look of the place gave him, despite his mood, a sense of tranquil pleasure. The high-backed, claw-toed chairs, the tall, mahogany clock, with its chicken-cock on top, seeming to welcome him with the same quiet face which had watched him from childhood, were pleasant to the troubled man; and the fireplace tiles, and the red curtains, and the bits of Delft ware on the mantel were all so agreeable to his sense of beauty in form and color that he threw himself into a chair with some feeling of comfort. His sister left her work, and, crossing the room, kissed him. Evidently he was her chief venture in life! From long habit of dependent growth the root fibres of his being were clasped about her, as a tree holds fast for life and support to some isolated rock, and neither he nor she was any more conscious than the tree or rock of the economic value which he took out of their relation. On his part, it was a profound attachment, merely an attachment; on hers a pure and simple, venerative love. Women expect much from an idol and get little, but believe they get everything; and now and then, even as to the best a woman can set up, she has cankering doubts. "Brother," said Miss Wendell, cheerfully, "I was thinking, before you came in, how thankful we should be for all our life, just now. You are getting some practice," then observing his face, "not all you will have, you know, but enough, with the hospital, to let us live, oh, so pleasantly!" Patting his cheek tenderly, she added, "And best of all for me, I feel that you are not worried, that you are having a chance, at last." "I hardly know if they are worth the studying! But never mind me. I am cross to-night." "Oh, no, that you are not. I won't have you say that! You are tired, I dare say, and troubled about all those poor fellows in the hospital." Wendell moved uneasily. She was sitting on the arm of his chair, and running her hand caressingly through his hair, which was brown, and broke into a wave of half curl around his forehead. Her consciousness as to much of her brother's outer range of feelings was almost instinctive, although, of course, it misled her often enough. "I knew that was it," she said, with a loving sense of appreciation. "I was sure it was that. What has happened at the hospital? I heard Dr. Lagrange |