The Project Gutenberg EBook of Song of the Lark, by Willa Cather

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Title: Song of the Lark

Author: Willa Cather

Posting Date: June 25, 2008 [EBook #44]
Release Date: 1992

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SONG OF THE LARK ***

Produced by Judith Boss and Marvin Peterson

SONG OF THE LARK

By Willa Cather

(1915 edition)

CONTENTS:

PART I. FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD
II. THE SONG OF THE LARK
III. STUPID FACES
IV. THE ANCIENT PEOPLE
V. DOCTOR ARCHIE'S VENTURE
VI. KRONBORG
EPILOGUE

PART I. FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD

I

Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish
clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in
Moonstone. His offices were in the Duke Block, over the drug store.
Larry, the doctor's man, had lit the overhead light in the waiting-room
and the double student's lamp on the desk in the study. The isinglass
sides of the hard-coal burner were aglow, and the air in the study was
so hot that as he came in the doctor opened the door into his little
operating-room, where there was no stove. The waiting room was carpeted
and stiffly furnished, something like a country parlor. The study had
worn, unpainted floors, but there was a look of winter comfort about it.
The doctor's flat-top desk was large and well made; the papers were in
orderly piles, under glass weights. Behind the stove a wide bookcase,
with double glass doors, reached from the floor to the ceiling. It was
filled with medical books of every thickness and color. On the top shelf
stood a long row of thirty or forty volumes, bound all alike in dark
mottled board covers, with imitation leather backs.

As the doctor in New England villages is proverbially old, so the doctor
in small Colorado towns twenty-five years ago was generally young.
Dr. Archie was barely thirty. He was tall, with massive shoulders
which he held stiffly, and a large, well-shaped head. He was a
distinguished-looking man, for that part of the world, at least.

There was something individual in the way in which his reddish-br