“Great honor, no doubt, but mighty inconvenient. Why, when my wife’s sister was took the other night I run all the way from my house to the doctor’s only to find the door closed and that everlasting placard up at the side: ‘Gone out of town.’ I say it’s a shame, I do, and no other doctor to be found within five miles.” “You ought to live in Boston. There they have doctors enough.” “Yet they send for ours.” “Do you know,” another voice spoke up, “that I had rather go sick till morning, or have one of my folk’s sick, than take that road up by the churchyard after ten o’clock at night. I think it’s the gloomiest, most God-forsaken spot I ever struck in all my life. To think of a doctor living next door to a graveyard. It’s a trifle too suggestive, I say.” “I wouldn’t care about that if he wasn’t so like a graveyard himself. I declare his look is like a hollow vault. If he wasn’t so smart I’d ’a’ sent for the Wells doctor long ago. I hate long white faces, myself, no matter how handsome they are, and when he touches me with that slender cold hand of his, the shivers go all over me so that he thinks I am struck with a chill. And so I am, but not with a natural one, I vow. If we lived in the olden times and such a man dared come around the death-beds of honest people such as live in this town, he’d have been burnt as a wizard.” “Come, I won’t hear such talk about a neighbor, let alone a man who has more than once saved the lives of all of us. He’s queer; but who isn’t queer? He lives alone, and cooks and sleeps and doctors all in one room, like the miser he undoubtedly is, and won’t have anything to do with chick or child or man or woman who is not sick, unless you except the village’s _protégée_, Polly Earle, whom everybody notices and does for. But all this does not make him wicked or dangerous or uncanny even. That is, to those who used to know him when he was young.” “And did you?” “Wa’al, I guess I did, and a handsomer man never walked Boston streets, let alone the lanes of this poor village. They used to say in those days that he thought of marrying, but he changed his mind for some reason, and afterward grew into the kind of man you see. Good cause, I’ve no doubt, for it. Men like him don’t shut themselves up in a cage for nothing.” “But——” “Don’t let us talk any more about the doctor,” cried the lodger who did not have a dog. “You spoke of a little girl whom everybody does for. Why is that? The topic ought to be interesting.” The landlord, who had talked more than his wont, frowned and filled his pipe, which had gone out. “Ask them fellers,” he growled; “or get my wife into a corner and ask her. She likes to spin long stories; I don’t.” “Oh, I don’t care about asking anybody,” mumbled the stranger, who was a sallow-faced drummer with a weak eye and a sensual mouth. “I only thought——”