oster suddenly flapped his wings and
crowed--a sound which caused me to leap all of nineteen feet Fahrenheit,
sidewise. Then, as I walked along a fence which later by day I saw had
a comfortable resting board on top, two lambent golden eyes surveyed me
out of inky darkness! Great Hamlet's father, how my heart sank! Once
more I leaped to the cloddy roadway and seizing a cobblestone or hunk of
mud hurled it with all my might, and quite involuntarily. Then I ran
until I fell into a crossing ditch. It was an amazing--almost a
tragic--experience, then.

In due time the doctor came--and I never quite forgave him for not
making me wait and go back with him. He was too sleepy, though, I am
sure. The seizure was apparently nothing which could not have waited
until morning. However, he left some new cure, possibly clear water in a
bottle, and left again. But the night trials of doctors and their
patients, especially in the country, was fixed in my mind then.

One of the next interesting impressions I gained of the doctor was that
of seeing him hobbling about our town on crutches, his medicine case
held in one hand along with a crutch, visiting his patients, when he
himself appeared to be so ill as to require medical attention. He was
suffering from some severe form of rheumatism at the time, but this,
apparently, was not sufficient to keep him from those who in his
judgment probably needed his services more than he did his rest.

One of the truly interesting things about Dr. Gridley, as I early began
to note, was his profound indifference to what might be called his
material welfare. Why, I have often asked myself, should a man of so
much genuine ability choose to ignore the gauds and plaudits and
pleasures of the gayer, smarter world outside, in which he might readily
have shone, to thus devote himself and all his talents to a simple rural
community? That he was an extremely able physician there was not the
slightest doubt. Other physicians from other towns about, and even so
far away as Chicago, were repeatedly calling him into consultation. That
he knew life--much of it--as only a priest or a doctor of true wisdom
can know it, was evident from many incidents, of which I subsequently
learned, and yet here he was, hidden away in this simple rural world,
surrounded probably by his Rabelais, his Burton, his Frazer, and his
Montaigne, and dreaming what dreams--thinking what thoughts?

"Say," an old patient, friend and neighbor o