said.
Then, for a time he was silent. Pollyanna, stealing a glance at
his face, felt vaguely sorry for him. He looked so sad. She wished,
uneasily, that she could "do something." It was this, perhaps, that
caused her to say in a timid voice:

"Dr. Chilton, I should think being a doctor would, be the very gladdest
kind of a business there was."

The doctor turned in surprise.

"'Gladdest'!--when I see so much suffering always, everywhere I go?" he
cried.

She nodded.

"I know; but you're HELPING it--don't you see?--and of course you're
glad to help it! And so that makes you the gladdest of any of us, all
the time."

The doctor's eyes filled with sudden hot tears. The doctor's life was
a singularly lonely one. He had no wife and no home save his two-room
office in a boarding house. His profession was very dear to him. Looking
now into Pollyanna's shining eyes, he felt as if a loving hand had been
suddenly laid on his head in blessing. He knew, too, that never again
would a long day's work or a long night's weariness be quite without
that new-found exaltation that had come to him through Pollyanna's eyes.

"God bless you, little girl," he said unsteadily. Then, with the bright
smile his patients knew and loved so well, he added: "And I'm thinking,
after all, that it was the doctor, quite as much as his patients, that
needed a draft of that tonic!" All of which puzzled Pollyanna very
much--until a chipmunk, running across the road, drove the whole matter
from her mind.

The doctor left Pollyanna at her own door, smiled at Nancy, who was
sweeping off the front porch, then drove rapidly away.

"I've had a perfectly beautiful ride with the doctor," announced
Pollyanna, bounding up the steps. "He's lovely, Nancy!"

"Is he?"

"Yes. And I told him I should think his business would be the very
gladdest one there was."

"What!--goin' ter see sick folks--an' folks what ain't sick but thinks
they is, which is worse?" Nancy's face showed open skepticism.

Pollyanna laughed gleefully.

"Yes. That's 'most what he said, too; but there is a way to be glad,
even then. Guess!"

Nancy frowned in meditation. Nancy was getting so she could play this
game of "being glad" quite successfully, she thought. She rather enjoyed
studying out Pollyanna's "posers," too, as she called some of the little
girl's questions.

"Oh, I know," she chuckled. "It's just the opposite from what you told
Mis' Snow."

"Opposite?" repeated Pol