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Harte, Bret, 1836-1902

"Drift from Two Shores"

He was a pale man, and, I fancied, still paler from his
black clothes.
He handed me a note.
It was from a certain physician; a man of broad culture and broader
experience; a man who had devoted the greater part of his active
life to the alleviation of sorrow and suffering; a man who had
lived up to the noble vows of a noble profession; a man who locked
in his honorable breast the secrets of a hundred families, whose
face was as kindly, whose touch was as gentle, in the wards of the
great public hospitals as it was beside the laced curtains of the
dying Narcissa; a man who, through long contact with suffering, had
acquired a universal tenderness and breadth of kindly philosophy; a
man who, day and night, was at the beck and call of anguish; a man
who never asked the creed, belief, moral or worldly standing of the
sufferer, or even his ability to pay the few coins that enabled him
(the physician) to exist and practice his calling; in brief, a man
who so nearly lived up to the example of the Great Master that it
seems strange I am writing of him as a doctor of medicine and not
of divinity.


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