12 THE DARWIN FAMILY. 



of character felt sure that he was to be trusted. So he ad- 

 vanced this sum, which w^as a very large one for him while 

 young, and was after a time repaid. 



" I suppose that it was his sympathy which gave him un- 

 bounded power of winning confidence, and as a consequence 

 made him highly successful as a physician. He began to 

 practise before he was twenty-one years old, and his fees 

 during the first year paid for the keep of two horses and a 

 servant. On the following year his practice was large, and 

 so continued for about sixty years, when he ceased to attend 

 on any one. His great success as a doctor was the more 

 remarkable, as he told me that he at first hated his profession 

 so much that if he had been sure of the smallest pittance, or 

 if his father had given him any choice, nothing should have 

 induced him to follow it. To the end of his life, the thought 

 of an operation almost sickened him, and he could scarcely 

 endure to see a person bled — a horror which he has trans- 

 mitted to me — and I remember the horror which I felt as a 

 schoolboy in reading about Pliny (I think) bleeding to death 

 in a warm bath, . . . 



" Owing to my father's power of winning confidence, many 

 patients, especially ladies, consulted him when suffering from 

 any misery, as a sort of Father-Confessor. He told me that 

 they always began by complaining in a vague manner about 

 their health, and by practice he soon guessed what was really 

 the matter. He then suggested that they had been suffering 

 in their minds, and now they would pour out their troubles, 

 and he heard nothing more about the body. . . . Owing to 

 my father's skill in winning confidence he received many 

 strange confessions of misery and guilt. He often remarked 

 how many miserable wives he had known. In several in- 

 stances husbands and wives had gone on pretty well to- 

 gether for between twenty and thirty years, and then 

 hated each other bitterly ; this he attributed to their hav- 

 ing lost a common bond in their young children having 

 grown up. 

 ^ "But the most remarkable power v.-hich my father pos- 



\ 



