"But he’s not a regular doctor," protested the girl, mildly. "They say he is not allowed to practise, and that he only uses remedies of his own making. The physicians at Darley were talking of having him arrested not long ago." "Oh, I know all that," Jane said, petulantly, "but that’s because he cured one or two after they had been given up by licensed doctors. He knows a lots, and he will tell me, anyway, whether I’ve got a cancer or not. He knows what they are. He told Mrs. Hiram Snodgrass what her tumor was, and under his advice she went to Atlanta and had it cut out, and saved her life when two doctors was telling her it was nothing but a blood eruption that would pass off. You know he is good-hearted." With a troubled nod, Virginia admitted that this was true. Her sweet mouth was drawn down in pained concern, a stare of horror lay in her big, gentle eyes. "I’ll go bring him," she promised. "I saw him pass with a bag of meal from the mill just now." "Well, tell him not to say anything about it," Jane cautioned her. "Evidently Ann Boyd has not talked about it much, and I don’t want it to be all over the neighborhood. I despise pity. I’m not used to it. If it gets out, the tongues of these busy-bodies would run me stark crazy. They would roost here like a swarm of buzzards over a dying horse." Virginia returned in about half an hour, accompanied by a gray-headed and full-whiskered man of about seventy years of age, who had any other than the look of even a country doctor. He wore no coat, and his rough shirt was without button from his hairy neck to the waistband of his patched and baggy trousers. His fat hands were too much calloused by labor in the field and forest, and by digging for roots and herbs, to have felt the pulse of anything more delicate than an ox, and under less grave circumstances his assumed air of the regular visiting physician would have had its comic side. "Virginia tells me you are a little upset to-day," he said, easily, after he had gone to the water-bucket and taken a long, slow drink from the gourd. He sat down in a chair near the widow, and laid his straw hat upon the floor, from which it was promptly removed by Virginia to one of the beds. "Let me take a look at your tongue." "I’ll do no such of a thing," retorted Jane, most flatly. "There is nothing wrong with my stomach. I am afraid I’ve got a cancer on my breast, and I want to make sure."