on a greater mind.

"Out!" commanded Mary,--"out the front door."

Adam, in describing that dramatic moment, always declared that nobody
but Mary Dunbar could have engineered a feather-bed through the narrow
passage, without sticking midway. He recalled an incident of his boyhood
when, in the Titcomb fire, the whole family had spent every available
instant before the falling of the roof, in trying to push the
second-best bed through the attic window, only to leave it there to
burn. But Mary Dunbar took her patient through the doorway as Napoleon
marched over the Alps; she went with him down the road toward her own
little house under the hill. Only then did Adam, still shuffling on
behind, collect his intelligence sufficiently to shout after her,--

"Mary, what under the sun be you doin' of? What you want me to tell
Mattie? S'pose she brings the selec'men, Mary Dunbar!"

She made no reply, even by a glance. She walked straight on, as if her
burden lightened, and into her own cave-like house and her little neat
bedroom.

"Lay him down jest as he is," she said to Jacob. "We won't try to shift
him to-day. Let him get over this."

Jacob stretched himself, after his load, put his hands in his pockets,
and made up his mouth into a soundless whistle.

"Yes! well!" said he. "Guess I better finish milkin'."

Mary put her patient "to-rights," and set some herb drink on the back of
the stove. Presently the little room was filled with the steamy odor of
a bitter healing, and she was on the battlefield where she loved to
conquer. In spite of her heaven-born instinct, she knew very little
about doctors and their ways of cure. Earth secrets were hers, some of
them inherited and some guessed at, and luckily she had never been
involved in those greater issues to be dealt with only by an exalted
science. Later in her life, she was to get acquainted with the young
doctor, down in Tiverton Street, and hear from him what things were
doing in his world. She was to learn that a hospital is not a slaughter
house incarnadined with writhing victims, as some of us had thought. She
was even to witness the magic of a great surgeon; though that was in her
old age, when her attitude toward medicine had become one of humble
thankfulness that, in all her daring, she had done no harm. To-day, she
thought she could set a bone or break up a fever; and there was no doubt
in her mind that, if other deeds were demanded of her, she should be led
in t