o would be invaluable to him, if he
only let him have his own way of doing what was to be done.

The Doctor's hired man had not the manners of a French valet. He was
grave and taciturn for the most part, he never bowed and rarely smiled,
but was always at work in the daytime, and always reading in the
evening. He was hostler, and did all the housework that a man could
properly do, would go to the door or "tend table," bought the provisions
for the family,--in short, did almost everything for them but get their
clothing. There was no office in a perfectly appointed household, from
that of steward down to that of stable-boy, which he did not cheerfully
assume. His round of work not consuming all his energies, he must needs
cultivate the Doctor's garden, which he kept in one perpetual bloom,
from the blowing of the first crocus to the fading of the last dahlia.

This garden was Abel's poem. Its half-dozen beds were so many cantos.
Nature crowded them for him with imagery such as no Laureate could
copy in the cold mosaic of language. The rhythm of alternating dawn and
sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible through all the
sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed in corresponding
floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel, the plain
serving-man. It softened his whole otherwise rigid aspect. He worshipped
God according to the strict way of his fathers; but a florist's
Puritanism is always colored by the petals of his flowers,--and Nature
never shows him a black corolla.

He may or may not figure again in this narrative; but as there must
be some who confound the New England hired man, native-born, with
the servant of foreign birth, and as there is the difference of two
continents and two civilizations between them, it did not seem fair to
let Abel bring round the Doctor's mare and sulky without touching his
features in half-shadow into our background.

The Doctor's mare, Cassia, was so called by her master from her cinnamon
color, cassia being one of the professional names for that spice or
drug. She was of the shade we call sorrel, or, as an Englishman would
perhaps say, chestnut,--a genuine "Morgan" mare, with a low forehand, as
is common in this breed, but with strong quarters and flat hocks, well
ribbed up, with a good eye and a pair of lively ears,--a first-rate
doctor's beast, would stand until her harness dropped off her back at
the door of a tedious case, and trot over hill and dale