Whatever was the cause, Nancy Pansy was the old doctor’s boon companion; and wherever the old doctor was, whether in his old rattling brown buggy, with Slouch jogging sleepily along the dusty roads which Middleburgh called her “streets,” or sitting in the shadiest corner of his porch, Nancy Pansy was in her waking hours generally beside him, her great pansy-colored eyes and her sunny hair making a bright contrast to the white locks and tanned cheeks of the old man. His home was just across the fence from the big house in which Nancy Pansy lived, and there was a hole where two palings were pulled off, through which Nancy Pansy used to slip when she went back and forth, and through which her little black companion, whose name, according to Nancy Pansy’s dictionary, was “Marphy,” just could squeeze. Sometimes, indeed, Nancy Pansy used to fall asleep over at the old doctor’s on the warm summer afternoons, and wake up next morning, curiously enough, to find herself in a strange room, in a great big bed, with a railing around the top of the high bedposts, and curtains hanging from it, and with Marphy asleep on a pallet near by. “That child is your shadow, doctor,” said Nancy Pansy’s mother one day to him. “No, madam; she is my sunshine,” answered the old man, gravely. Nancy Pansy’s mother smiled, for when the old doctor said a thing he meant it. All Middleburgh knew that, from old Slouch, who never would open his eyes for any one else, and old Mrs. Hippin, who never would admit she was better to any one else, up to Nancy Pansy herself. Perhaps this was the reason why when the war broke out, and all the other men went into the army, the old doctor, who was too old and feeble to go himself, but had sent his only son Harry, was chosen by tacit consent as Middleburgh’s general adviser and guardian. Thus it was he who had to advise Mrs. Latimer, the druggist’s wife, how to keep the little apothecary’s shop at the corner of the Court-house Square after her husband went into the army; and it was he who advised Mrs. Seddon to keep the post-office in the little building at the bottom of her lawn, which had served as her husband’s law office before he went off to the war at the head of the Middleburgh Artillery. He even gave valuable assistance as well as advice to Mrs. Hippin about curing her chickens of the gapes; and to Nancy Pansy’s great astonishment had several times performed a most remarkable operation by inserting a hair from old Slouch’s mane down the invalid’s little stretched throat. He used to go around the town nearly every afternoon, seeing the healthy as well as the sick, and giving advice as well as physic, both being taken with equal confidence. It was what he called “reviewing his out-posts,” and he used to explain to Nancy Pansy that that was the way her father and his Harry did in their camp. Nancy Pansy did not wholly understand him, but she knew it was something that was just right; so she nodded gravely, and said, “Umh-hmh!”