ons, that little doctor. Let him go into any
house, an' some o' the family, seems though, has to be operated on,
usually inside o' twelve hours. It'll get so that as soon as he strikes
the front porch, they'll commence sterilizin' water. I donno but some'll
go an' put on the tea-kettle if they even see him drive past."

_Why_ within twelve hours, we wonder when we hear the edict? Why never
fourteen hours, or six? How does it happen that no matter at what stage
of the malady the new doctor is called, the patient always has to be
operated on within twelve hours? Is it that everybody has a bunch and
goes about not knowing it until he appears? Or is he a kind of basanite
for bunches, and do they come out on us at the sight of him? There are
those of us who almost hesitate to take his hand, fearing that he will
fix us with his eye, point somewhere about, and tell us, "Within twelve
hours, _if_ you want your life your own." But in spite of his skill and
his modernity, in our midst there persist those who, in a scientific
night, would die rather than risk our advantages.

Thus the New shoulders the Old, and our transition is still swift enough
to be a spectacle, as was its earlier phase which gave over our Middle
West to cabins and plough horses, with a tendency away from wigwams and
bob-whites. And in this local warfare between Old and New a chief figure
is Calliope Marsh--who just said that about the new doctor. She is a
little rosy wrinkled creature officially--though no other than
officially--pertaining to sixty years; mender of lace, seller of
extracts, and music teacher, but of the three she thinks of the last as
her true vocation. ("I come honestly by that," she says. "You know my
father before me was rill musical. I was babtized Calliope because a
circus with one come through the town the day't I was born.") And with
her, too, the grafting of to-morrow upon yesterday is unconscious; or
only momentarily conscious, as when she phrased it:--

"Land, land, I like New as well as anybody. But I want it should be put
in the Old kind o' gentle, like an _i_-dee in your mind, an' not sudden,
like a bullet in your brain."

In her acceptance of innovations Calliope symbolizes the fine Friendship
tendency to scientific procedure, to the penetration of the unknown
through the known, the explication of mystery by natural law. And when
to the bright-figured paper and pictures of her little sitting room she
had added a print of the