acting as a surgeon, or a surgeon acting as
a physician, can demand payment, even of the
poor: his salary not covering such services.
Connected with the little stipend is also the
advantage that it remains to the holder as a
retiring pension, after forty years' service.
Twenty-five years' service quality for a
pension equal to one-half of the salary; twenty
years, for a third. Two and a-half per cent,
of all pay is deducted as a contribution to the
widows' fund, out of which widows are
pensioned with a sixth of the deceased husband's
official income.

Ours is an island commune, and our signor
doctor, Don Tommaso Sanguesuga, has an
income of, I should think, as much as fifty
pounds a-year. He is a very learned man,
and has been chosen for our syndic on the
strength of his reputation for great wisdom.
We all understand, too, that he is a man who
need not stint his wine, and can afford to eat
his ragout at least once a-week. We look
up to him accordingly. He came to us
unmarried; and the want of a wife is a great
drawback in the medical profession. Seeing
that to be the case, he speedily took to himself
the advocate's daughter; and the couple
prosper. I, of course, during my own
illness, applied to Don Tommaso. The milk
and water had not done me any good;
and I was only half persuaded by my good
friend, Bugiardello, to try the effect of a
vegetable poultice over the region of the milt; of
course, the barber had, in the meantime,
urged upon me copious and periodical bleeding;
but I would surrender myself only into
the hands of the regular practitioner, and
Doctor Sanguesuga was called in. I was
much edified by the learned discussions which
he carried on at my bed-side, with some
invisible disputant, and much solaced by the length
of the words he employed, and the acquaintance
he showed with the dead languages, which
must be strong to save a man from dying. The
good doctor's treatment of me was that which
he uses in all cases, namely, some combination
of these three ideas—a foot-bath, bleeding, and
a sudorific. I recovered health. Therefore he
is my friend. I make unceremonious calls upon
him; and although while I mount his stairs I
always fancy that I hear much scuffling and
running in his room, yet when I reach the wise
man's study, and enter it, I find him in complete
abstraction, poring over his book. He reads
with his coat off, and his hands buried in his
hair; and he is so immersed in constant
study, that he never becomes conscious of my
presence until I take the liberty to lay a hand
upon his shoulder. Boerhave is his great
authority; but, the works of other men of
the same standing, bound in parchment, are
upon his shelves. Boerhave may not be
among the most recent authorities to which
physicians in France, England, Germany, or
other such countries, refer, but he was a great
man in his day, and so in his day and village
is the Doctor Sanguesuga. Our doctor has
even saved money by frugal living, goes well
dressed himself, adorns his wife with a gold
chain and coral bracelets; more than all,
he has contrived to buy five or six little houses,
and has become a landowner. Yet I can
scarcely have guessed his income at too low
a sum. After my own illness, I pondered
much upon the bill I had run up, and thought
of all the guineas my good friend had earned.
Not being experienced in the customs of the
place, I referred the case to my servant.

"Well, signor," said she, "eightpence a visit
is the sum paid to the great Doctor Sandolgo,
the famous military surgeon; but that is paid
by wealthy strangers. Here you are living
in this commune, and paying taxes, for which
reason I don't see that you will be expected
to pay anything to Doctor Sanguesuga."

To that suggestion I demurred, and my
servant went on,

"Well, to be sure, your excellency is
an Englishman, and you would like to do
something generous and handsome, so I should
think you might . . . . O, no, I fear it would
be too much!"

"What?"

"I was thinking that you might send the
doctor what would, indeed, be extravagant."

"But what was it?"

"A leg of mutton."

I paid my doctor, therefore, with a leg of
mutton, and was lauded on all sides for that
act of profuse generosity. Having found this
notion so extremely satisfactory, I always pay
the doctor, now, with mutton; and, when I
have had much need of the lawyer's services,
I send him a round of beef. One cannot help
remembering that such a payment to him is
pecuniary in the oldest sense of the word,
which was derived from pecus (cattle), at a
time when ox-flesh stood for money.

       INSTRUCTIVE COMPARISONS.

THERE are in Edinburgh two industrial
schools, both very well conducted, though
founded upon opposite theories of education
for the poor. A local pamphlet that
has found its way into our hands,
analyses the results that have in each case
been obtained by matter-of-fact comparison
between the last annual reports of the two
institutions. The evidence obtained in this
way is, we think, so far as it goes, of a kind
likely to be useful to the public.

Of the two institutions thus compared,
one, known as the Original Ragged School, is
by some years the elder. Its foundation has
been one of the many good works of a
benevolent and able minister, whose high local
repute does not exceed his merit—Dr.
Guthrie. The management of this school,
resting mainly in the hands of free churchmen,
and entirely in the hands of pious
Protestants, it follows that Protestant teachers,
the Protestant version of the Bible,
Protestant commentaries, have been made