d to all the countryside. Whenever any one
was ill, and ice was wanted, they always came to the chateau. Our good
old doctor was not at all in the movement as regarded fresh air and
cold water, but ice he often wanted. He was a rough, kindly old man,
quite the type of the country practitioner--a type that is also
disappearing, like everything else. Everybody knew his cabriolet (with
a box at the back where he kept his medicine chest and instruments),
with a strong brown horse that trotted all day and all night up and
down the steep hills in all weathers. A very small boy was always with
him to hold the horse while he made his visits.

Our doctor was very kind to the poor, and never refused to go out at
night. It was funny to see him arrive on a cold day, enveloped in so
many cloaks and woollen comforters that it took him some time to get
out of his wraps. He had a gruff voice, and heavy black overhanging
eyebrows which frightened people at first, but they soon found out
what a kind heart there was beneath such a rough exterior, and the
children loved him. He had always a box of liquorice lozenges in his
waistcoat pocket which he distributed freely to the small ones.

The country doctors about us now are a very different type--much
younger men, many foreigners. There are two Russians and a Greek in
some of the small villages near us. I believe they are very good. I
met the Greek one day at the keeper's cottage. He was looking after
the keeper's wife, who was very ill. It seemed funny to see a Greek,
with one of those long Greek names ending in "popolo," in a poor
little French village almost lost in the woods; but he made a very
good impression on me--was very quiet, didn't give too much medicine
(apothecaries' bills are always such a terror to the poor), and spoke
kindly to the woman. He comes still in a cabriolet, but his Russian
colleague has an automobile--indeed so have now many of the young
French doctors. I think there is a little rivalry between the
Frenchmen and the foreigners, but the latter certainly make their way.

What is very serious now is the open warfare between the cure and the
school-master. When I first married, the school-masters and mistresses
took their children to church, always sat with them and kept them in
order. The school-mistress sometimes played the organ. Now they not
only don't go to church themselves, but they try to prevent the
children from going. The result is that half the childre