ixed pupils; and the good lady wondered whether she were angry
at having been induced to come up. She had a general impression that
when genius was original its temper was high, and all this would be the
case with Doctor Prance. She wanted to say to her that she could go down
again if she liked; but even to Miss Birdseye's unsophisticated mind
this scarcely appeared, as regards a guest, an adequate formula of
dismissal. She tried to bring the young Southerner out; she said to him
that she presumed they would have some entertainment soon--Mrs.
Farrinder could be interesting when she tried! And then she bethought
herself to introduce him to Doctor Prance; it might serve as a reason
for having brought her up. Moreover, it would do her good to break up
her work now and then; she pursued her medical studies far into the
night, and Miss Birdseye, who was nothing of a sleeper (Mary Prance,
precisely, had wanted to treat her for it), had heard her, in the
stillness of the small hours, with her open windows (she had fresh air
on the brain), sharpening instruments (it was Miss Birdseye's mild
belief that she dissected), in a little physiological laboratory which
she had set up in her back room, the room which, if she hadn't been a
doctor, might have been her "chamber," and perhaps was, even with the
dissecting, Miss Birdseye didn't know! She explained her young friends
to each other, a trifle incoherently, perhaps, and then went to stir up
Mrs. Farrinder.

Basil Ransom had already noticed Doctor Prance; he had not been at all
bored, and had observed every one in the room, arriving at all sorts of
ingenious inductions. The little medical lady struck him as a perfect
example of the "Yankee female"--the figure which, in the unregenerate
imagination of the children of the cotton-States, was produced by the
New England school-system, the Puritan code, the ungenial climate, the
absence of chivalry. Spare, dry, hard, without a curve, an inflexion or
a grace, she seemed to ask no odds in the battle of life and to be
prepared to give none. But Ransom could see that she was not an
enthusiast, and after his contact with his cousin's enthusiasm this was
rather a relief to him. She looked like a boy, and not even like a good
boy. It was evident that if she had been a boy, she would have "cut"
school, to try private experiments in mechanics or to make researches in
natural history. It was true that if she had been a boy she would have
borne so