atched from behind many a window-blind.
Neither was there any stir to give hint that from the upstairs window
of the village shop at the end of the street a telescope was pointing
at him, while Granny Long informed the breathless circle about her bed
that his necktie was of blue-gray satin, and that his hair was thick
and wavy.

Quite unconscious of the sensation he was creating, the new doctor
walked on. He passed a tiny white house set in a square garden bright
with early blossoms. A little woman, in a faded lilac gown, sat sewing
on the porch, and a green parrot, in a cage at her side, stalked to and
fro on his perch, muttering sullenly. At sight of the stranger the
bird gave an indignant stare, then swung, head downward, from his perch
and shouted, "Oh, Lordy, ain't we havin' a slow time!"

The remark so exactly coincided with the new doctor's sentiments that
he looked over the cedar hedge at the speaker with a feeling of
friendly regard. But the little lilac lady seemed quite of another
mind. She sprang up in dismayed haste, scattering thimble and scissors
out on the pathway, and, seizing the cage, fled with it indoors.

Gilbert passed on, feeling that there was one creature, at least, in
this new place who was in sympathy with him. His eye traveled with
satisfaction along the double row of trim houses and neat gardens; they
spoke of thrift and prosperity. There was only one exception, the
place next to the home of the ennuied parrot. Hens scratched merrily
in the midst of desert flower-beds, or nested under the lilac bushes, a
handsome goose and gander passed in stately promenade up and down the
front veranda, and the whole place had a happy, go-as-you-please air.

The last in the line was the schoolhouse, a big, square building,
scarred and worn, standing in the middle of a yard trampled bare of
grass, and surrounded by the forlorn skeleton of a fence. From the
battered pump in one corner, to the dilapidated woodshed in the other,
the whole premises had the appearance of having just weathered a long
and terrible siege. The commanding voice of the Duke of Wellington
coming through the open windows added to its military suggestiveness.

When he had passed the school the stranger found himself at the end of
the village. The row of houses stopped at a rustic bridge spanning a
ravine. Away up this valley he could see the tall smokestack of the
sawmill, with its waving plume of smoke coming up out of a