PROLEGOMENON. 23 



humanity, that the laborer in this department is not gene- 

 rally considered worthy of his hire, but is held in profane 

 estimation, fearful, fatal evidence of the barbarism of the 

 hour ! as a vulgar pill-peddler, monkey -hunter, or swabber 

 of intestines, who should find in the mere performance of the 

 interesting details and duties of his profession a sufficient 

 and exceeding great reward for his troubles,) than the 

 forty-and-one swops of chips and whetstones in eiforts to 

 touch the penny, in the truck-trade of a country doctor's bill- 

 collecting ; practising his art, as supposed by his patients, 

 under the employment of the commonwealth or Heaven, 

 whilst making his bread by his wit in other lines of business- 

 operations, as in the intellectual and refined manoeuvres 

 of trafficking in the flesh of horses, or in the scarcely more 

 rational efforts of making brick without straw, it might be, 

 chimerical experiments in the fabrication of lumber by 

 steam : in short, existing by the wit and tricks of common! 

 trade or huckstering, and discharging, at the same time, the 

 august duties of the medical profession for the pure, un- 

 mixed love of the Father of all and his wretched children, 

 the suffering human family. It will be pardoned, then, in 

 the grand scheme of benevolence and love of the Moun- 

 tain Sanatarium, if visions of some royal highroad to for- 

 tune might have profanely mingled a little. Here the 

 unhappy alas ! ! did and indeed could not foresee exactly 

 ^ whither that hallucination might lead him, even into waste 

 spaces and vast abysses of suffering of all orders and 

 degrees, but, most of all, into heart-scaldings and sorrows, 

 in this same line of the dollar, its treacheries and despot- 

 isms. The devil seems not to have forgotten his ancient 

 stratagem of trying experiments in the line of money-temp- 

 tations on tops of mountains, or of attempting to get the 

 dollar, (like the wedge of Achan,) a perpetual element of 

 discord and death, into all the really good, benevolent, and 

 heavenly operations of this lower world. The enterprise 

 in itself involved the necessity of sundry and various 

 rencounters with dangerous creatures of the financial deeps, 



