ging mist, and blurred lights of thought, and a still
foreboding of change. A sense of the vast tranquil movement of Nature,
of her sympathy and of her indifference, sank deeply into his heart.
For a time he realised that all things, and he, too, some day, must
grow old; and he felt the universal pathos of it more sensitively,
perhaps, than he would ever feel it again.

If you had told Carmichael that this was what he was thinking about as
he sat in his bachelor quarters on that November night, he would have
stared at you and then laughed.

"Nonsense," he would have answered, cheerfully. "I'm no
sentimentalist: only a bit tired by a hard afternoon's work and a
rough ride home. Then, Balzac always depresses me a little. The next
time I'll take some quinine and Dumas: he is a tonic."

But, in fact, no one came in to interrupt his musings and rouse him to
that air of cheerfulness with which he always faced the world, and to
which, indeed (though he did not know it), he owed some measure of his
delay in winning the confidence of Calvinton.

He had come there some five years ago with a particularly good outfit
to practice medicine in that quaint and alluring old burgh, full of
antique hand-made furniture and traditions. He had not only been well
trained for his profession in the best medical school and hospital of
New York, but he was also a graduate of Calvinton College (in which
his father had been a professor for a time), and his granduncle was a
Grubb, a name high in the Golden Book of Calvintonian aristocracy and
inscribed upon tombstones in every village within a radius of fifteen
miles. Consequently the young doctor arrived well accredited, and was
received in his first year with many tokens of hospitality in the
shape of tea-parties and suppers.

But the final and esoteric approval of Calvinton was a thing apart
from these mere fashionable courtesies and worldly amenities--a thing
not to be bestowed without due consideration and satisfactory reasons.
Leroy Carmichael failed, somehow or other, to come up to the
requirements for a leading physician in such a conservative community.
In the judgment of Calvinton he was a clever young man; but he lacked
poise and gravity. He walked too lightly along the streets, swinging
his stick, and greeting his acquaintances blithely, as if he were
rather glad to be alive. Now this is a sentiment, if you analyse it,
near akin to vanity, and, therefore, to be discountenanced in yo