having "hung out his shingle," came to me greatly discouraged and said, "I think I shall have to give up the practice of medicine." "Why so, Doctor?" said I in surprise, knowing his ability and future promise. "Because," said he, “I do not think I can earn enough to support myself and my wife" (for he was already married), "and I do not wish to be dependent all my life on my father." "How much have you earned by your practice since your graduation?" I asked. He replied, "It is now seven months since I opened my office, and I have received exactly $2.50." In other words, in 210 days he had received a little more than one cent a day! And in my own personal experience, when I had been in practice for five years, in the month of June, I paid and received, all told, seven visits, of which three were charity visits, two patients ran away and paid me nothing, and two paid me $1.00 each.

Many years ago I was returning in the street cars, at six o'clock in the morning, from St. Mary's Hospital, where I had spent the entire night in attending to the victims of a terrible fire in a mill, and, seeing my case of instruments, a laborer, evidently an intelligent man, just starting for his summer day's work, accosted me and wanted to know where I had been. Upon my telling him what I had been doing, he said to me: “I suppose you'll get a right good salary for working all night and doing a lot of operations"; and he was completely dumbfounded when he learned that not only had I gone to the hospital at my own expense, but had served the institution for years without charge, and that every hospital surgeon, hospital physician, and hospital resident in the city gave his labor and the best work of his life for years entirely free of charge to the patients under his care.

Yet time brings its rewards, and you will find if you do good work that your friends and neighbors will after a time surely recognize your merit. If you have genius you may gain a fortune; but even mediocrity is sure of a competence

if you are faithful and honest in your work. No man need ever despair of making at least a decent living by the practice of medicine.

But pecuniary rewards are not the best that you will get, if you cultivate everything that ennobles the profession and discourage all that tends to make it merely a trade by which to make money. What, then, are the real rewards which the profession of medicine holds out to you? They may be sketched somewhat in the following manner.

First, you will enjoy a sense of daily duty faithfully performed. This fills a noble heart with a glow far beyond the satisfaction of an expanding balance in bank or a growing hoard of stocks and bonds.

"Count that day lost whose low descending sun
Views from thy hand no noble action done."

If you do, you may be sure that no day will be lost, but that each will be counted among your gains. Duty is often irksome drudgery; but put your heart into it and the lowest drudgery becomes the highest service and will not fail of its reward. As quaint old George Herbert says:

"A servant with this clause

Makes drudgery divine;

Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws
Makes that and the action fine."

Life, for the most part, is a matter of trivial details. The growth of character, like all other growth in nature, is the result of the steady, multiplied activity of many small parts. The giant oak which resists the stoutest storm does so because in the many days of soft rain and bright sunshine its roots were slowly spreading far and wide in the fertile soil by the growth of cell upon cell and fibre after fibre, its strength being tested and confirmed by summer breezes and occa

sional wintry winds, and at last when the storm comes in its fury the mighty tree has so faithfully done its duty in its minute, but constant, growth, that it stands unmoved and unassailable. So the small daily duties of life, if faithfully performed, will gradually develop your character and fix your principles so firmly that the storm of temptation, however violent, cannot bend or swerve you from the path of duty.

This daily duty may lead you into danger, which you must face with the coolness and courage of the soldier on the field of battle. True, for the soldier of science and of duty there is no blare of trumpets, no beating of drums, no shouts of the combatants, no public honors, no laurel wreath, for the young physician is in the lowly home of poverty, battling with the angel of death, exposed to the poison of diphtheria, of yellow fever, of cholera, or of typhus, and may himself fall in the encounter, a victim to his brave sense of duty to his patient; and the surgeon in the hospital exposes himself daily to the dangers of blood-poisoning, dangers which I have seen in more than one case cut short a life of promise and hide it in the grave. But he lives in grateful hearts, unknown though he may be to the pages of history, or even beyond a small circle of equally obscure friends. But their prayers and cries are heard of the good God, and the Recording Angel will enter every such unselfish deed in God's Book of Remembrances.

"They have no place in storied page,

No rest in marble shrine;

They are past and gone with a vanished age,

They died and 'made no sign.'

But work that shall find its wages yet,

And deeds that their God did not forget,

Done for their love divine

These were the mourners, and these shall be
The crowns of their immortality.

"O! seek them not where sleep the dead,
Ye shall not find their trace:

No graven stone is at their head,

No green grass hides their face;

But sad and unseen is their silent grave-
It may be the sand or the deep sea wave,

Or a lonely desert place;

For they need no prayers and no mourning bell—
They were tombed in true hearts that knew them well."

No other calling has ever had such a multitude of brave, unselfish, unknown, silent martyrs, who have freely risked all that is dearest and best, even to life itself, as our own Profession. Their lives have not been lost, for, as Ruskin has well said, "Every noble life leaves the fibre of it interwoven forever in the work of the world."

Not only will you have this sense of daily duty well done, but if you use your time well there will be a daily personal growth in knowledge. To this end, study after you have graduated, as you have never done in your so-called "student life." Make even your failures a fertile soil for a larger growth and better achievement, for

"The tree

Sucks kindlier nurture from a soil enriched
By its own fallen leaves; and man is made,
In heart and spirit, from deciduous hopes
And things that seem to perish."

You will have earned each day a certain modicum of money, but you will also have added to the store of knowledge in your mind, to be of use to your future patients; so that your gains cannot be measured merely in dollars and cents, but in wider knowledge, in pregnant ideas, in mental growth, in better judgment, in a better balanced mind, and in masterful ability to cope with dangers by reason of such larger knowledge.

More than this; you promote the general welfare and add

to the prosperity of the community in which you live, by directly diminishing the loss of time and money to the wageearners of the community. You restore the sick mother to the charge of her household, the disabled father to his family -nay, in not a few cases you save life itself. And how much a single life may mean to a man's wife, his children, his business, his church, his community, his nation! Even if you cannot save life, you lessen suffering and bring cheer into the sick-room, and you smooth the pillow of death itself.

In Preventive Medicine you can do still more, and on a far larger scale, by educating the community as to personal and municipal health, by pointing out the evils of dirt, of filthy streets, of foul sewers, of impure water, of tuberculous meat and milk, of crowded tenements, of unwise clothing, of want of exercise, of want of the daily bath, of errors of food and drink, of vile habits, and a host of other enemies to human health and happiness. This, believe me, is to be the greatest function, the most splendid achievement of the coming years.

And, lastly, in this brief sketch which I am giving you, you should do one thing more. Remember that science looks to you for enlargement of its boundaries, by conquests in the domain of ignorance. I envy you your position on the threshold of the glorious twentieth century. The passing century has seen great victories, but the next one will see far more. Our profession is not complete, "totus, teres, atque rotundus," but I believe it has, as it were, just begun its beneficent career. The discovery of Anaesthetics and of Antisepsis, and the creation of the science of Bacteriology have been the three great triumphs in medicine of the nineteenth century. You enter upon this great heritage, freely bequeathed to you by your predecessors, you begin where they left off. With such advantages you should make still greater advances, and I believe that you are on the eve of still more blessed and portentous discoveries. The cause and