Doctor Zay

NOTE.

BELMONT, October 28, 1881.

DEAR MISS PHELPS, —I am glad to learn from you that your story is soon to see the light; and I avail myself of the opportunity you give me to notice publicly that coincidence of some of its outlines with those of my novel, Dr. Breen’s Practice, of which we have already spoken together. When you first mentioned your plot to me, I heard you quite through before I told you that I had already written and partly in type a story dealing with the same situations and the same characters in a certain degree; and then I strongly urged you to go on and complete your work, assuring you, as Editor of The Atlantic, that I should be all the more eager to publish it because of that coincidence. It seemed to me at that time, as it now seems to Mr. Aldrich, that this would give it an additional attraction with those interested in the problems touched; and that no one would suppose you to have borrowed any feature of your plot from so poor a contriver of such things as I am.

I shall fall back upon my good intention if, in the course of your story, this voluntary statement of mine appears, as I fear it may, a quite gratuitous impertinence. Yours sincerely,

W. D. HOWELLS.

I.

“ To my nephew, Waldo Yorke, of Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts, all such properties of mine as are vested in shipping, timber, or lumber, in the town of Sherman, in this State.”

This was vague, but the more stimulating. What can compare with the bewitchment of arduous pursuit for uncertain privilege? There is an Orphean power well known to reside in testamentary documents, whereby the most insignificant legacy will draw the most imposing fortune to dance attendance upon its possession. But it is doubtful if Waldo Yorke, of Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts, would have found himself inspired to a personal investigation of his departed relative’s kind intentions concerning himself, but for a certain constitutional sensitiveness to this allurement attending the pursuit of unknown results.

“ Send a lawyer, Waldo.” His mother had said this over the coffee for which she delicately prescribed the proper Yorke admixture from the Sèvres creamer. She spoke with the slightly peremptory accent which certain mothers retain, either from force of habit or from intrinsic delight in the sound, long after the expectation of filial submission has become a myth of the Golden Age. Mrs. Yorke, although quite lame, was a handsome woman, who wore point appliqué.

Her son had reminded her that in sending Waldo Yorke he really was not far from doing the precise, if remarkable, tiling of which she spoke.

“ Quite true,” said the lady. had forgotten. Your having a profession so seldom occurs to one, Waldo. And cousin Don would have been glad to go, now the season is over at the Club. He has nothing else to do.”

“ I am somewhat overborne with that calamity myself, mother,” the young man had said, coloring slightly. “ I don’t think we will discuss the thing. I am going to hunt up Uncle Jed’s legacy.”

Mrs. Yorke had not discussed the thing. Although not yet even indulgently talked of as “ rising ” in his profession, this idle, strong-limbed, restless son of hers had incisive preferences, with which she was familiar, as well as with his somewhat sturdy methods of executing them. And although they had only each other to be “ beholden to ” in all the world, — that is to say, in Beacon Street, — they were accustomed to yield one another the large liberty of assured affection. A summer of separation was to be expected, when one was the lame old mother of a nervous young man. Mrs. Yorke had kissed her son good-by royally, and here he was.

Here he was, lazily riding at the laziest hour of the sleepy noon, — he and the sensitive horse he had been so fortunate as to find in Bangor for the trip. He had been alone with the pony and his own thoughts, through the magnificent Maine wilderness, for now two long, memorable days. An older traveler than young Yorke would have found them valuable days. He had chosen the land route, seventy-two miles from Bangor. He had a certain kind of thirst for solitude, which comes only to the city born and bred ; most keenly to the young, and most passionately to the overtasked. Waldo Yorke had never been overtasked in his life, He leaned to the splendors through which he journeyed, enthusiastically, but criticised Nature, like an amateur, while he drank.

He had chosen the land route partly, perhaps, in deference to faint associations with wild tales of it, told him years ago by that myth of a dead uncle, in course of the only appearance he ever made in Beacon Street, — Uncle Jed, whom his mother, somehow, never urged the child’s going to visit, while never distinctly discountenancing it, either. Poor Uncle Jed was a good man, but had never had papa’s advantages, my son. But my son had conceived a passing chivalrous fancy for an uncle at a disadvantage, and remembered sitting in his lap, and stroking his grizzled cheek with the soft pink palm of first one little hand, and then the other, and asking him why he had n’t any little boys, and if God left them in heaven, or forgot to send them down. Poor Uncle Jed was a bachelor, as well as a myth.

So this was the wilderness where the good old myth had lived, loved — did he ever love ? his nephew wondered. Lived, loved, died. No : lived, loved, got rich, and died; or lived, got rich, and died, as you chose to put it. What a place to live and die in ! Or to get rich in. Or to love in, either, for that matter.

The young man leaned against the cushions of the covered buggy, which seemed to arouse as much bewildered effort of the perceptive faculties in the stray natives whom he met as if it had been a covered mill-pond, and indulged in that hazy reverie which is possible only to ease and youth. What were his visions ? What are the thoughts of a distinguished-looking youug man, with one foot swinging for very luxury of idleness over the buggy’s edge against the step, the reins thrown across one muscular arm, and both gloved hands clasped behind a rather wellshaped head? A young man with wellborn eyes, and well-bred mouth ; and he scorns to stoop to vices who carries just such a fashion of the nostril and the chin.

The route that young Yorke had chosen led him into the unparalleled deserts and glories of the wild Maine coast. Sudden reserves and allurements of horizon succeeded each other. They were finely-contrasted, like the moods of a woman as strong as she is sweet, and as sincere as she is either. Forest and sea vied to win his fancy. At the turning of a rein he plunged into impenetrable green, cool solitude. He became, perforce, a worshiper in Nature’s cathedrals. Arch beyond arch, they lifted stately heads. Density within density, hung shadows in which it seemed no midday light could see to find a target. Welcome chills came from these shadows that struck upon the feverish cheek. Dry, unrecognized perfumes fled across them, clean and fine. Above, the dome of ether quivered with the faint, uncertain motion of hot air upon a summer noon. Drops of light fell through, upon the neutral-tinted shade that broke the sienna color of the winding road. As far as eye could see, the forest locked mighty arms before the traveler, as if to hold him to its heart forever.

Then swiftly at the tripping of a cypress, at the surrender of an oak, at the fleeing of a rank of pines, at the shaking of a ghostly beard of moss, behold ! the solemn barricade has given way. You have but turned a corner, yet the forest lets you go angrily, desperately, and yields you to the sea.

Now the straight noon sunshine palpitates before, behind, about you. The road sweeps, yellow and lonely, past a dreary little hut, a solitary farm. The ruts worn by the daily stage, passed an hour before you, begin to grow distinct in the white heat. Rocks loom, a mass of wealthy outline against unbroken sky, and curved and curious beaches kneel to wet their lonely foreheads in the sea.

Your cathedral has turned you outof-doors utterly. Galleries of wonder beckon you on. Irregular sculpture starts, half-moulded, from the wild, gray cliffs. Sketches which Nature seems to have begun, but never cared to finish. unfold before you, vast, imperfectly interpreted, evanescent. Music, sweet from the now unseen birds in the deserted forest, sad from the waves upon the untrodden beaches, pulsates through the vivid air. It seems to the rider that the butterflies keep time to it; that the daisies in the gentle fields are nodding to it. Motionless cattle in the pastures, stray, solitary children on the fences, idle smoke from desolate chimneys, pass him by rhythmically. His thoughts, still busy with the forest, receive from all these things little else than a vague consciousness of the presence of life and light.

Life and light! The words have a familiar and a solemn sound.

Are they snatches from some forgotten sentiment of Holy Writ ? John, perhaps? John, the golden - lipped, happy-hearted young enthusiast ? What a poet that fisherman was ! No wonder that modern dispute centres battling about the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel. Life and light ! In all the universe, those only were the two words that could interpret the summer-noon meaning of this virgin State of Maine.

In all the universe —

Nonsense !

Yorke remembered that he was hungry, and would have his dinner. In all the universe, — what then ? Heaven knows ! It was some mad fancy about womanhood, or youth,—love, perhaps, if the truth must out; how a woman sometimes came to a man’s life—he had heard of such women — suddenly, thoroughly, as upon the reserve of the forest had flashed the glory of the sea. Meanwhile, a man must have his dinner ; a matter not to be ignored in dealing with ideal wilderness or ideal woman. He pulled the rein smartly over the nervous pony, reflecting, with the hardened cynicism of a bachelor of twenty-eight, that he would like to see the woman who would be Life and Light to him ! I think, though, if we stop to look at it, that the young fellow preserved, after all, for his sacred metaphor something of the reverence which is native to all delicate natures; and that in the innermost of all consciousness, which we hide even from ourselves, the words held under covert of a sneer the fugitive of a prayer.

With the fall from heaven to earth, discovering that he was hungry, the young man cherished a mild suspicion that he had strayed a little out of his way. Surely, the last reduced but hopeful sign-board had explicitly “ arisen to explain ” that it was six miles and a half to the town of Sherman. If he had traveled six miles and a half he had traveled ten since then, and of other guide-boards, those ignes fatui in which he confided with the touching faith of youth and inexperience, there were none to be seen. Two, indeed, he had passed, valorously guarding a cart-path, but wind, weather, or fate had long since decapitated them. Over against their corpses one patient fellow stood on duty in a whortleberry thicket, for what concrete or abstract purpose no mortal could divine, with his head, from which all recognizable features were successfully washed away, held rakishly under his arm. Another, apparently a drunken, disorderly officer, seemed to have gone upon a spree, and tumbled facedown into a brook. But neither of these sources of Maine enlightenment had directed the dense Massachusetts mind to the town of Sherman.

Bringing the entire force of the Massachusetts mind now to bear upon the non-appearance of any visible means of dining, a process in which the Maine pony showed a sympathy above all provincialism, the traveler accosted the first native he happened to meet, and something like the following conversation took place : —

Yorke: “ Can you tell me how far it is to Sherman, sir ? ”

Native : “ Hey ? ”

Yorke: “Would you oblige me by saying how near I am to the town of Sherman ? ”

Native, interrogatively: “ Sherman ? ”

Yorke, decidedly : “ Yes ; Sherman.”

Native, reflectively : “ Sherm-an.”

A pause.

“ Travelin’ fur ? ”

“ From Bangor to Sherman.”

“ Oh! ”

“ I fear I have got out of my way,

I hope you can direct me.”

“ Wall. You said Sherman ? ”

Yorke, emphatically : “ I certainly

did ! ”

Native, cheerfully: “Wall. If it’s Sherman you’re goin’ fur, Ish’d ventur’ it might be a matter of eight mile — to Sherman. Hancock’s nigher. So ’s Cherrytown.”

Yorke, explosively: “ But I do not wish to visit Hancock or Cherrytown ! ”

“ Oh, you don’t. Wall.”

Native’s wife, coming to the door, and standing with heavy hand raised, gaunt forefinger stretching down the road : “ That’s the way to Sherman : down that there gully, and take your second left and your fust right, and then foller the wind. But it ain’t no eight mile.”

Yorke, lost in thinking how much she looks like a Maine sign-post: “ Thank you, madam. How far do you call it to Sherman ? ”

“ It ain’t a peg over six, — Sherman ain’t.”

Native’s boy, pushing between his parents, and appearing vivaciously in the foreground: “It’s three mile ’n’ a half, mister ! And you don’t take your second left. You jest foller your nose, an’ you ’ll make it. Folks hain’t ben thar sence the old hoss died. I went one winter. I belong to the Sherman Brass Band.”

“ It’s true,” said the woman, apologetically, “ me and Mr. Bailey don’t get to Sherman very often. But Bob, — he don’t know a mile from a close pin.”

A prolonged pause.

“ Is there a hotel in this — this metropolis ? ” asked Yorke, looking vaguely about the beautiful wilderness.

“ Sir? ”

“ Is there a tavern in this village ? ”

“ No, sir.”

“ Do you ever accommodate hungry travelers with a dinner in your own family ? ”

“ Wall, no; we never hev. They mostly go to Nahum Smithses.”

“ Can I get anything to eat, in this desert, of Mr. Smith or any other citizen of your acquaintance ? ”

“Wall, mebbe you might. Might ask. Nahum Smith is a gentleman as puts up.”

Yorke, reviving : “ A gentleman that puts up ? That sounds hopeful. How far is it to this gentleman’s ? ”

Native: “ Two miles.”

Native’s wife: “It’s two ’n’ a quarter.”

Native’s boy, disrespectfully and musically : “ ’T ain’t a mi-i-ile ! ”

Yorke turned away, with such gratitude towards this enlightened family as he could muster into expression, and set out grimly in search of the gentleman that put up.

The woman ran after him for some distance through the dusty, blazing, blinding noon. He reined up, and she called kindly, gesticulating with her lean arms, “ If you come acrost a woman ridin’ in a little frisky wagin with an amberel atop, just you ask her. She ’ll know! ”

It was one of those coincidences which make, according to one’s temperament, either the poetry or the superstition of life, that young Yorke, in the course of twenty minutes’ savage and unsuccessful pursuit of the gentleman that put up, coming sharply to the top of a glaring hill, saw at the foot of it, dimly through the dust, a sight as foreign to the Maine wilderness as a sleigh to Florida or a barouche to Sahara. It was a pony phaeton. It stood before a gray old farm-house door, and the clean-cut, slender gray mare who drew it was tied to the crumbling fence. It was a basket phaeton, with a movable top of a buff color, — a lady’s phaeton, evidently.

Yorke was, as yet, too inexperienced a traveler “ across country ” to know that in three cases out of five it is from a woman one will get most accurate geographical directions. He might have passed the pony phaeton with scarcely a serious remembrance of the advice he had received, but just before he reached the farm-house the owner of the carriage came suddenly out.

She came suddenly out and down the grass-grown walk, with the nervous step natural to a person in habitual haste ; but a healthy step, even and springing. Yorke noticed as much as this in the instant that he balanced in his mind the advisability of addressing the lady.

For it was, unmistakably, a lady.

The young man — being a young man — took in with subtle swiftness a sense of her youth, for she was young; of her motions, which were lithe. Of her face his impressions were hazy. It might have been fine, or not. He seldom suffered himself to acquire an opinion of a woman’s face at first sight; he had so often learned to hold such impressions as frauds on his intelligence. Her dress, he thought, was blue, or black, or blue-black, or black-and-blue. What did it matter ? She was already escaping him, and with her, apparently, his only mortal hope of dinner. What superhuman power could do for a man even in the Maine wilderness he would not dogmatically decide, but his confidence in human assistance was at that faint ebb produced by prospective starvation; and Mr. Nahum Smith, or any other gentleman that put up, he had begun to locate with other interesting and amusing myths with which his education had made him familiar.

The young lady had untied her horse (with the quickness of a practiced driver), had swept into the phaeton, had gathered the reins, and was off. If she had noticed him at all, it was in a busy fashion, with the single quick, abstracted glance usual to strangers in a crowd, in vivid contrast to the Down-East stare. Yorke felt that it was becoming a desperate case. He reined in the Bangor pony.

“ I beg pardon, madam ! ”

The basket phaeton, just whirling away, came to a pause unconcernedly.

“ I beg pardon for the liberty, but will you direct me to the town of Sherman ? ”

Something in Yorke’s accent of desperation was funny. The young lady’s eyes twinkled for an instant. She looked as if she would have laughed if she had dared. But she answered him with grave politeness.

“ It is four miles to Sherman.”

“ Thank you.” The young man sat, with his hat raised, hesitating. “ I ought to apologize for troubling a lady. But I have met nothing but dislocated sign-posts and admiring natives for ten miles. One gave me as correct information as another. Is Sherman the nearest place where I can get a dinner ? ”

“ I think it is,” said the young lady. “ Yes, I know it is. If you take your first left below here, you will find it an easy four miles.” She spoke with the unconscious ease with which only an American lady could have addressed a stranger met upon an unknown errand on a solitary road; but she gathered her reins as she spoke.

“ I am extremely obliged to you,” persisted Yorke. “ You said the second left ? ”

“ I said the first left. I am going to Sherman. If your horse is not too tired to keep distantly in sight, my phaeton will direct you without further trouble.”

She spoke as simply as one gentleman might have spoken to another. Yorke, too profoundly grateful to her to notice this at first, remembered it as the gray mare sped away through the hollow.

How exquisitely it was done! The Beacon Street gentleman felt a glow of appreciation of the little scene, viewed purely as a specimen of the religion of good manners. He would have liked his mother to see it. It was the sort of thing she could estimate at its worth.

“ Going to Sherman,” — what a divine Christian recognition of the fact that he was a stranger, and the Maine wilderness had taken him in ! Even that though a man, he might yet be a gentleman, out of his way, misdirected, tired, perplexed, and hungry. “ If his horse were not too tired,” — what a delicate fashion of comparing the exhausted and now abject-looking Bangor pony with her own sturdy little steed! “ Distantly in sight,” — could language more ? Faint, swift, maidenly afterthought to the kindly impulse ! Yorke had wrought himself into rather a glow, perhaps, by dint of present gratitude and promised dinner, but that simple little speech certainly seemed to him, as he thought of it, a classic in its way.

Meanwhile, the “ frisky wag in ” had tripped along over knoll and hollow, and the bright “ amberel atop ” had turned into the thickly-wooded road and disappeared from view. Waldo Yorke whipped up and hurried on.

Distantly in sight, indeed! Was there an innocent sarcasm in that womanly thrust? The gray mare could make her eleven miles an hour easily, if put to it. The Bangor pony begged piteously now at six. The basket phaeton flew to Sherman. The buggy struggled after. The mare put her head down, and trotted straight and stiff, — a steady roadster. The buggy followed by the fits and starts, the turns of elation and depression, the jerks of hope and lurches of despair, familiar to drivers of nervous ponies at the end of a steady pull. Distantly in sight ! He should do well, indeed, if he kept a mirage of her in sight.

They had turned now quite away from the coast-line. The scattering farms, the tiny huts with enormous barns attached, the intelligent natives, the heavy stage-track, the dust, the glare, the cliffs, the sea, had vanished. The forest opened its arms again to the travelers, and the world grew green and cool.

Off the stage-road here, the density seemed deeper, the shadow more abandoned. Through the impressive solitude the gay little phaeton cover danced along ; through it the solemn black buggy-top lumbered and climbed. The figure of the dainty driver in the phaeton, erect, slender, and blue, sat motionless as a caryatide out of employment. The eyes of the traveler in the buggy vigilantly pursued it: chiefly, it must be admitted, because he wanted his dinner; possibly, in part because he fancied the pose of the caryatide, — any man would.

The shadow deadened as they rode, but not from the darkening of the day. On either hand the solid serried oaks seemed to step out and press against the narrow drive-way; thickets, whose black hearts relieved the various outlines of wild blackberry, sumach, elder, and grape, netted themselves more tightly, and grew stiff, looking like bronze; the aspens and pallid birches wooed one another across the narrowing road. Vistas of soft gloom stretched on. There was no light now, but dickering needles, fine as those of the pines, and drifting with them, that with difficulty pierced the opaque green heavens of the over-reaching trees. One looked twice in the low tone of the place even to see what the roadside flowers were. Yorke had almost passed unnoticed an apple-tree in blossom, and it was past the first of June. Nothing could have so vividly presented to him a sense of the painful Maine spring, and the frozen, laggard life that looked out from behind it upon a gentler world.

It occurred to him for the first time, as the depth and solitude of the road made themselves fully manifest, to wonder if the young lady felt no hesitation in trusting herself to drive over it alone. Apparently, he had here some society girl, whose whim it was to be unfashionable, and in Maine, at this unusual season. She was a little intoxicated with Nature’s grand unconventionality ; had no more fear, it seemed, than a butterfly released from a chrysalis.

He wondered if she did him the credit not to take him for a cut-throat. But a grim glance at the widening distance between the phaeton and the buggy strangled this bit of self-satisfaction at its first breath. Plainly, the case involved not so much a high opinion of the man as a low one of the horse.

Those delicate lovers, the birch and aspen, and the more ardent ones, the oak

and hickory, beyond them, were now making themselves obnoxious, as lovers always do to third parties, and swept a fragrant and defiant arch low across the way. Swift in the passing, the buff umbrella went deftly down. Slow in the following, the buggy-top groaned back.

The blue caryatide was daintily cut now against the heavy shadow. Fine pencilings of light fell on her: she wore, it might be, a straw hat, which caught them; they struck her hair, too, and her shoulder. She stirred but once. Then she turned to break some appleblossoms. She picked the flowers at full speed and standing.

Yorke, as he watched her with the half-amused attention of a traveler who has nothing better to do than to “ follow the duty nearest him,” got the jingle of Lucy Gray into his head : —

And now Yorke put his case to the Bangor pony, and despairingly relinquished it. The buggy lagged dead at the foot of the hill. The phaeton speeding across the hollow, reached the crossing of the ways, turned a sudden corner, and was gone.

“ And never looked behind,” sighed the young man, out of temper with the pony, or the jingle, or what not.

When the Bangor pony panted up to the cross-roads the phaeton had vanished utterly. The caryatide had become a dream, a delusion, a slender and obliging deceiver. Four solitary roads pierced the forest at four separate green angles. A dull sign-board stood in the square, and the traveler hastened gratefully to it. It bore in faded tints, once red and yellow and inspiring, an advertisement of Hooflands’ German Bitters.

Blue caryatides, indeed ! In what hues less intellectually respectable was the young woman perhaps portraying him by this time to the summer people at Sherman, a party of gay girls like herself ?

The young man bit his lip somewhat distinctly, for a Bostonian, and stood for a moment irresolute in the heart of the cross-roads, uncertain which of the four narrow wooded ways looked least as if it ended in a cranberry swamp, or a clearing, or other abstractly useful but concretely dinnerless locality.

Suddenly, his eye caught the soft, irregular outline of some small object lying in the dust, a rod or so down the direct road. He drove up to it. As he approached it grew piuk, as if it blushed. It was an apple-blossom.

II.

Yorke’s faith in woman rallied. If the caryatide meant it, — and a caryatide might be capable of just such a picturesque procedure, — it was very delicately done. If she did not mean it, at all events he had got scientifically past the cross-roads on his way, and she had got successfully out of it. He picked up the apple-blossom, and drove on. It could not have been ten minutes before his dumb guide brought him abruptly from the forest almost into the heart of the village.

The little town of Sherman slept peacefully in the afternoon sun. No one seemed to be astir. No glimmer of a phaeton cover shone across the hot, still street. The caryatide was gone, — where, it really did not occur to the young man to wonder. He and the Bangor pony forgot her with equal rapidity and success, in the leisurely hospitality of the Sherman Hotel.

SHERMAN, MAINE, June 5th.

MY DEAR MOTHER, — I hope you promptly received the letter I mailed from Bangor. Another went, also, from some indefinite locality in the Maine wilderness: they called it a post-office ; I believe it was a town-pump — or an undertaker’s; but my memory is not precise on this point.

I am just settled and at work. Uncle Jed’s affairs are a mesh as fine as that eternal tatting Lucy Garratt used to bring over to our house, when she was a school-girl. My regards to the Garratts, by the way, when you write.

It threatens to be a process of some weeks to unravel my tatting, and I have taken lodgings with Uncle Jed’s executor. I stood the Sherman Hotel for twenty-four hours. I’ve saved one of their doughnuts for a croquet-ball, to complete your imperfect set. Direct your letters, if you please, care Isaiah Butterwell, Esq.

In Isaiah Butterwell I find a genuine “ fine old country gentleman,” and Uncle Jed’s confidential and devoted friend. He is a man of property, influence, and honor in this place. It is kind in them to take me in. Mrs. Isaiah says she is glad of my society. She, by the way, has an eye like a linnet and a tongue like a Jonathan Crook pocket-knife, and a receipt for waffles which in itself has reconciled me to Sherman society for indefinite lengths.

I seem to be the only member of the family besides the united head. It is a huge house, with wings, dead white, and reminds me of a Millerite robed and wondering why he can’t fiy. We seem to live a good deal at one side of the house, and one of the wings belongs to me. I have not explored as yet beyond my own quarters and the dining-room. Strain the Beacon Street imagination, if you can, up to the level of waffles for tea ! She asked me, too, if I would have feathers or hair, and did I prefer woolen sheets ? The house is perfectly still, and altogether delightful. As I write a single sound of wheels breaks the deep, sweet country silence. They roll softly up and past my window to the barn ; probably Mr. Butterwell has been to the prayer-meeting, a dissipation to which his good wife endeavored to decoy me. Rather late for a prayer-meeting, too. Mr. Isaiah drives a good horse, I perceive.

Speaking of good horses, I lost my way, coming on, and was piloted through the forest by a caryatide in a basket phaeton. Remind me to tell you about her when I get home.

To-morrow I drive out about twelve miles along the coast, to see a man who knows another man who has heard of a “widder lady ” who stands ready to purchase certain shares of a certain ship which come into poor Uncle Jed’s legacy. They launch their ships in salt brooks here, and trustfully tug them out in search of the sea. I shall convert all these wandering investments into cash as soon as possible, at any reasonable sacrifice, for I fancy there can’t be more than three or four thousand involved at most. The property is widely scattered, much of it in local loans, like that of most Maine merchants. My share, as you remember, is more concise. Write when you can. Remember me to cousin Don. Don’t miss me. It does n’t pay. Your affectionate son,

WALDO YORKE.

Waldo Yorke had started in search of the post-office to mail this letter, when Mrs. Isaiah Butterwell followed her guest to the door, and stood, while he was gathering the reins over the now gaylyrecuperated Bangor pony. Mrs. Butterwell was a well-dressed woman, in the Maine sense of the term. She had a homely, independent face, with soft eyes, — not unlike a linnet’s, as Yorke had said. She regarded him closely for a moment, and without speaking.

“ What a charming day ! ” said Yorke, feeling it necessary to be polite even at the expense of originality.

“ I’m too busy to bother with the weather,” replied Mrs. Isaiah, briskly. “ Can’t spare the time for that Down East.”

“ Indeed ! That is a frugal sentiment, at all events,” Yorke ventured.

“There’s no sentiment about it,” retorted Mrs. Butterwell. “It’s sense; as you’d find out if you lived here. If I’d spent myself noticing weather, I should have been in my grave ten winters ago. Are you fond of young women ? ”

The linnet put this startling question with gentle eyes, in which it was impossible to capture a ray of satire or of fun.

“ As I am of the State of Maine, — with reservations,” said Yorke guardedly, visions of Sherman “ society ” presenting themselves at once.

“Are you fond of an early dinner, then?” pursued Mrs. Butterwell, with the serene air of one who clearly sees the links of her own syllogism.

“ Passionately, madam.”

“ We dine,” said the hostess, bowing herself away with a certain dignity, “ at half past twelve.”

“ I will be at my post,” said the guest, smiling, “ dead or alive ! ”

“ I would n’t say that if I was you,” urged Mrs. Isaiah Butterwell, returning to the door-step, and looking gravely at the young man. “I’ve always thought, if I’d been God, I’d have been tempted to take people up that way, just for the sake of it. Talk about his tempting folks ! Folks throw a terrible lot of temptation in his way. But there it is. It just shows he is n’t made up like other people, after all. How that horse of yours does fuss ! ”

The Bangor pony was nervous indeed that morning; highly grained, after the journey, in Mr. Isaiah’s generous stable. The buggy sped along the village street with emphasis.

It is doubtful if the caryatide would have offered her services as guide to its occupant that day, through the beautiful heart of the forest, four miles deep.

Waldo Yorke, as he clattered through that pleasant representative Maine town, where the meeting-house, post-office, and “ store ” were the important features, and impressed him chiefly as reminiscences of American novels which he had tried to read and failed at the third chapter, amused himself by a rapid acquaintance with the business signs.

“ Goodsell, Merchant.” “ Cole and Wood : Lumber Dealers.” “ Dr. A. Lloyd.” “ Coffins, cheap for Cash.” “ Smith and Jones, formerly Jedediah Yorke,” —and so on. He got these things into his head as he had the rhyme of Lucy Gray, the day before, with that idiocy which asserts itself in this exasperating form, and which threatens to prove the human intellect more lawless than the passions or the will. He found himself particularly a victim to the cheerful refrain of “ Coffins, cheap for Cash.”

His host overtook him before he had driven far. Mr. Isaiah Butterwell, as Yorke had observed, shared the apparently well-spread Maine appreciation of a good horse. He reined up his heavy, handsome sorrel, and the two men rode abreast for a mile ; they chatted, across wheels, of horses, the estate and Uncle Jed, and Maine politics, and the price of lumber, and horses again. The Boston boy listened deferentially to the gray Maine merchant ; perceiving in him something of the same rugged dignity that Uncle Jed had borne in Beacon Street. Yorke felt that here was a king in his own country; he regarded the hardworked man with respect, and pleased himself with drawing his points out, and storing them up, so to speak, with a sense of increasing one’s knowledge of “ types.”

“ I’ve got to leave you, to collect some interest,” said Mr. Butterwell presently. “ That’s my turn, — the first right. You keep straight on till you find your man. Drive easy over the bridges. They ’re plaguey rickety, some of ’em. That pony of yours ain’t used to ’em in Bangor. Back to dinner ? Hope so. There, now, I wonder if my wife has told you — whoa ! — told you about — whoa, Zach Chandler! — about — Whoa ! ”

“ Oh, yes, she told me!” called Yorke politely, as the two horses nervously parted company. He looked, laughing, back to watch the old man, thinking how sacred their dinner hour was to these two lonely people; how large all little events must be in lives like theirs. His heart was full of a gentle feeling, half deference, half compassion. Mr. Butter well’s gray hair blew in the wind ; he held the reins wound double over his knotted wrist; he sat with left foot forward. Zach Chandler was a long-stepping horse. Waldo Yorke, looking over his shoulder, saw, and long remembered that he saw, these trifling things. Suddenly he felt a thrill in the reins at which his own horse was tugging steadily and sensibly. He turned his head, to see the Bangor pony tremble, rear, and leap ; to see the loose yellow boards of a murderously-laid bridge bound up; to see that there was no railing; to perceive a narrow streak of black — water, presumably ; and to know that he was scooped into the overturned buggy-top, and dragged, and torn, and swept away.

The whole thing may have taken three minutes. All that occurred to the young man quite clearly, as he went down, was, “ Coffins, cheap for Cash”

Against the blackness of darkness a blur appears ; it stirs ; it has extension and intension ; it throbs and thrills, and with the eternal wonder of creation moving upon chaos there is light. After all, how easy a matter it was to die! And coffins in Maine are cheap for cash. How could a man have believed that a process so abnormally dreaded for nearly thirty years could be, in truth, so normal and so deficient in the extreme elements of agony. To be sure, there was one crashing blow ; a compression of some endurance within narrow limits ; but he had suffered as much from neuralgia, far more from the prospect of death.

How clearly and distinctly, though slowly, vision returns, in this new condition ! There is a handsome old lady in a point appliqué cap. Like the child of Adah, she “ goeth lame and lovely.” By the way, will one make the acquaintance of a man like Lamb, in the society to which one is now to be introduced? Yes ; still the old lady in the lace cap. She is sitting by the library grate, alone ; her crutch has fallen to the floor; a yellow telegraph envelope is on the hearth; she is not weeping, but her face is bowed ; she looks very old; the lines about her mouth are pinched ; she has a haggard color. It seems easy to speak to her. How easy ! Mother ? Mother! She does not lift her head. Mother! It is true what we were told, then. The living do not hear. The dead may cry forever. A horrible deafness has fallen upon her. A man would have liked to see her once, — to say good-by, or to have her sit by him a few minutes. Yet it seems there is a woman here. That is a woman’s hand which rather hovers over than holds me. How cool it is ! How delicate! . . . Ah, no! Remove your hand ! It does not caress ; it tears me. Remove your hand! I am in agony. What in the name of life and death has happened to me in this accursed wilderness ? Was there anything in those old-fashioned dogmas after all ? Take off your hand, I say ! I know I might have been a better man, but I’ve tried to be clean and honest. I don’t say I’m fit for heaven, but I don’t deserve this. You torture me. Remove your hand ’ Am I in —

“ You are in your own room, sir,” said Mrs. Isaiah Butterwell, distinctly.

“ Ah ! — so I see.”

Yorke tried to lift his head; it fell back heavily, and he felt blood start.

“ Madam, you are very good. I must have been troublesome. I thought I was — dead.”

“ I’m sorry for you, Mr. Yorke, but I must say that I don’t approve of your theology,” said his hostess, grimly.

“ I dare say. I would not have offended you if — Ah, how weak I am! ”

“ Yes, sir.”

“ Am I much hurt ? ”

“ Some, Mr. Yorke.”

“How much? Answer me. I will have the truth. The blood flows — see ! when I even think that you may be deceiving me. Am I terribly hurt ? ” “lam afraid so, sir.”

A heavy silence falls.

“ Shall we telegraph for your mother, sir ? ”

“ My mother is crippled. No.”

“ For any sister, or anybody ? ”

“ I have no sister.”

“ Mr. Butterwell will write.”

“ Where is the doctor ? I should like to see him first. You have called a doctor ? ”

“ Oh yes, sir.”

Where is he ? ”

“ The doctor left about five minutes ago.”

“ What does he say ? ”

“ Very little.”

“ I wish to see the doctor before my mother is written to. Call him back ! — if you please. . . . Call him back, I say ! Why do you hesitate ? I may be a dead man in a few hours. Do as I bid you ! ”

“ The doctor said, Mr. Yorke ” —

“ Said what? ”

“ Said that— sh, Isaiah ! — he was to be the judge when it was best for you to see your physician. If you asked, I was to say that you will have every possible attention, and I was to say that all depends on your obedience.”

“ That sounds like a man who understands his business.”

“ Oh, indeed, sir, that is true ! Our doctor ” —

“ Oh, well; very well. Let it go. I must obey, I suppose. Never mind. Thank you. Move me a little to the left. I cannot stir. I am unaccountably sleepy. Has the fellow drugged me ? I think perhaps I may — rest ” — He did, indeed, fall into sleep, or a stupor that simulated sleep ; he woke from it at intervals, thinking confusedly, but without keen alarm, of his condition. The thing which worried him most was the probable character of this Down-East doctor, upon whose intelligence he had fallen. “The fellow absolutely holds my life in his hands,’’ he said aloud. It was hard to think what advance of science the practitioner undoubtedly represented. Dreamily, between his lapses into unconsciousness, the injured man recalled a fossil whom he had seen, on his journey from Bangor, lumbering about in a sulky at one of the minor stage stations ; a boy, too, just graduated, practicing on the helpless citizens, at Cherry town,—was it? No, but some of those little places. Then he thought of some representatives of the profession whom be had met in the mountains, and at other removes from the centres of society, He understood perfectly that he was a subject for a surgeon. He understood that he was horribly hurt. He thought of his mother. He thought of his mother’s doctor, whom he had so often teased her about. In one of his wakeful intervals, another source of trouble occurred to him for the first time. He called to his hostess, and restlessly asked, —

“ I suppose there is n’t a homœopathist short of Bangor ? ”

“ Our doctor is homœopathy,” said Mrs. Butterwell, instantly on the defensive ; “ but you need not be uneasy, sir, for a better, kinder ” —

“ My mother will be so glad ! ” interrupted the young man, feebly. He gave a sigh of relief. “ She would never have been able to bear it, if I had died under the other treatment. Women feel so strongly about these things.

I am glad to know that — for her sake,

— poor mother ! ” He turned again, and slept.

It was late evening when he roused and spoke again. He found himself in great suffering. He called petulantly, and demanded to be told where that doctor was. Some one answered that the doctor had been in while he slept. The room was darkened. He dimly perceived figures, — Mr. Butterwell in the doorway, and women ; two of them. He beckoned to his hostess, and tried to tell her that he was glad she had obtained assistance, and to beg her to hire all necessary nursing freely; but he was unable to express himself, and sank away again.

The next time he became conscious, a clock somewhere was striking midnight, He felt the night air, and gratefully turned his mutilated, feverish face over towards it. A sick-lamp was burning low, in the entry, casting a little circle of light upon the old-fashioned, largepatterned oil cloth. Only one person was in the room, a woman. He asked her for water. She brought it. She had a soft step. When he had satisfied his thirst, which he was allowed to do without protest, the woman gave him medicine. He recognized the familiar tumbler and teaspoon of his homœopathically educated infancy. He obeyed passively. The woman fed him with the medicine ; she did not spill it, or choke him ; when she returned the teaspoon to the glass, he dimly saw the shape of her hand. He said, —

“You are not Mrs. Butterwell.”

“No.”

“ You are my nurse ? ”

“ I take care of you to-night, sir.”

“I — thank you,” said Yorke, with a faint touch of his Beacon-Street courtliness ; and so fell away again.

He moved once more at dawn. He was alarmingly feverish. He heard the birds singing, and saw gray light through the slats of the closed green blinds. His agony had increased. He still moaned for water, and his mind reverted obstinately to its chief anxiety. He said, —

“ Where is that doctor ? I am too sick a man to be neglected. I must see the doctor.”

“ The doctor has been here,” said the woman who was serving as nurse, “ nearly all night.”

“ Ah! I have been unconscious, I know.”

“ Yes. But you have been cared for. I hope that you will be able to compose yourself. I trust that you will feel no undue anxiety about your medical attendance. Everything shall be done, Mr. Yorke.”

“ I like your voice,” said the patient, with delirious frankness. “ I have n't heard one like it since I left home. I wish I were at home ! It is natural that I should feel some anxiety about this country physician. I want to know the worst. I shall feel better after I have seen him.”

“ Perhaps you may,” replied the nurse, after a slight hesitation. “ I will go and see about it. Sleep if you can. I shall be back directly.”

This quieted him, and he slept once more. When he waked it was broadening, brightening, beautiful day. The nurse was standing behind him at the head of the bed, which was pushed out from the wall into the free air. She said : —

“ The doctor is here, Mr. Yorke, and will speak with you in a moment. The bandage on your head is to be changed first.”

“ Oh, very well. That is right. I am glad you have come, sir.” The patient sighed contentedly. He submitted to the painful operation, without further comment or complaint. He felt how much he was hurt, and how utterly he was at the mercy of this unseen, unknown being, who stood in the mysterious dawn there fighting for his fainting life.

. . . He handled one gently enough; firmly, too, — not a tremor ; it did seem a practiced touch.

The color slowly struck and traversed the young man’s ghastly face.

“ Is this the doctor ? ”

“ Be calm, sir, — yes.”

“ Is that the doctor’s hand I feel upon my head at this moment ? ”

“ Be quiet, Mr. Yorke, — it is.”

“ But this is a woman’s hand.”

“ I cannot help it, sir. I would if I could, just this minute, rather than to disappoint you so.”

The startled color ebbed from the patient’s face, dashing it white, leaving it gray. He looked very ill. He repeated faintly, —

“A woman’s hand! ”

“ It is a good-sized hand, sir.”

“I— Excuse me, madam.”

“ It is a strong hand, Mr. Yorke. It does not tremble. Do you see ? ”

“ I see.”

“ It is not a rough hand, I hope. It will not inflict more pain than it must.”

“ I know.”

“It will inflict all that it ought. It is not afraid. It has handled serious injuries before. Yours is not the first.”

“ What shall I do ? ” cried the sick man, with piteous bluntness.

“ I wish we could have avoided this shock and worry,” replied the physician. She still stood, unseen and unsummoned, at the head of his bed. “ I beg that yon will not disturb yourself. There is another doctor in the village. I can put you in his hands at once, if you desire. Your uneasiness is very natural. I will fasten this bandage first, if you please.”

She finished her work in silence with deft and gentle fingers.

“ Come round here,” said the patient feebly. “ I want to look at you.”

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.