on the jam--speaks to you everywhere, and has jokes about
everything."

"He's a fine man!" corroborated grandma.

"Yes; must be more than six feet high," I responded.

"An' such a gentleman, he's never above having a yarn with you about
anythink and everythink."

"Oh, well," I said, "any time I take these turns just send for him."

One doctor was as harmless as another to me. I knew it would relieve
the household to have a medico, and he could not injure me, seeing I
accorded his medicine and advice about as much deference as the hum of
a mosquito.

"Is he a family man?" I asked.

"Yes; so there are all your chances gone in one slap," said Carry,
appearing to inquire my state.

I did not tell her there was the most insuperable of all barriers in
the way of my marrying any one, and that I had no desire if I could.
The first I did not want known, and the second would not be believed
if it were, because, though woman is somewhat escaping from her
shackles, the skin of old crawl subjection still clings sufficiently
tight for it to be beyond ordinary belief that one could be other than
constantly on the look-out to secure a berth by appending herself to
some man, and more especially does this suspicion hang over a spinster
with her hair as grey as mine, and who takes up a position at a
boarding-house which is supposed to be the common hunting-ground of
women forced on to the matrimonial war-path.

"He has seven little children, and one's a baby, an' his wife is a
poor broken-down little thing near always in the hospital. You'd
wonder how he married her, _he's_ such a fine-looking man," vouchsafed
Andrew.

"Such a fine man that you'd wonder concerning several other patent
facts about him," I responded.

There was quite a chorus in favour of him now. He was evidently a true
gentleman in his patients' eyes, because he was not above stopping to
talk to them in their own vernacular about local gossip, and had the
reputation of great good nature in regard to the bills of the poor,
and they loved his jokes. They were of the class within grasp of the
elementary sense of humour of his audience. This type of gentleman he
undoubtedly was, but to that possessed of graceful tact and expressing
itself in good diction--by some considered necessary attributes of a
gentleman--he could lay no claim. Neither could he to that ideal
enshrined in my heart, who would not have had seven little
children--one of them a baby--and a poor