ts ash-barrel by the
fence. In this cabin lived alone the old and shriveled hag whose
hideousness gave her a reputation for almost supernatural knowledge. She
was at once doctress and newspaper. She collected and disseminated
medicinal herbs and personal gossip. She was in every regard
indispensable to the intellectual life of the neighborhood. In the
matter of her medical skill we cannot express an opinion, for her
"yarbs" are not to be found in the pharmacopoeia of science.

What took Ralph's breath was to find Dr. Small's fine, faultless horse
standing at the door. What did Henry Small want to visit this old quack
for?

CHAPTER X.

THE DEVIL OF SILENCE.

Ralph had reason to fear Small, who was a native of the same village of
Lewisburg, and some five years the elder. Some facts in the doctor's
life had come into Ralph's possession in such a way as to confirm
life-long suspicion without giving him power to expose Small, who was
firmly intrenched in the good graces of the people of the county-seat
village of Lewisburg, where he had grown up, and of the little
cross-roads village of Clifty, where his "shingle" now hung.

Small was no ordinary villain. He was a genius. Your ordinary hypocrite
talks cant. Small talked nothing. He was the coolest, the steadiest, the
most silent, the most promising boy ever born in Lewisburg. He made no
pretensions. He set up no claims. He uttered no professions. He went
right on and lived a life above reproach. Your vulgar hypocrite makes
long prayers in prayer-meeting. Small did nothing of the sort. He sat
still in prayer-meeting, and listened to the elders as a modest young
man should. Your commonplace hypocrite boasts. Small never alluded to
himself, and thus a consummate egotist got credit for modesty. It is but
an indifferent trick for a hypocrite to make temperance speeches. Dr.
Small did not even belong to a temperance society. But he could never be
persuaded to drink even so much as a cup of tea. There was something
sublime in the quiet voice with which he would say, "Cold water, if you
please," to a lady tempting him with smoking coffee on a cold morning.
There was no exultation, no sense of merit in the act. Everything was
done in a modest and matter-of-course way beautiful to behold. And his
face was a neutral tint. Neither face nor voice expressed anything. Only
a keen reader of character might have asked whether all there was in
that eye could live contented with