City and town life -- Fiction; Short stories, American
We put new wine in old bottles, but also we use new bottles to hold our
old wine. For, consider the name of our main street: is this Main or
Clark or Cook or Grand Street, according to the register of the main
streets of towns? Instead, for its half-mile of village life, the Plank
Road, macadamized and arc-lighted, is called Daphne Street. Daphne
Street! I love to wonder why. Did our dear Doctor June's father name it
when he set the five hundred elms and oaks which glorify us? Or did
Daphne herself take this way on the day of her flight, so that when they
came to draught the town, they recognized that it _was_ Daphne Street,
and so were spared the trouble of naming it? Or did the Future
anonymously toss us back the suggestion, thrifty of some day of her own
when she might remember us and say, "_Daphne Street!_" Already some of
us smile with a secret nod at something when we direct a stranger, "You
will find the Telegraph and Cable Office two blocks down, on Daphne
Street." "The Commercial Travellers' House, the Abigail Arnold Home
Bakery, the Post-office and Armoury are in the same block on Daphne
Street." Or, "The Electric Light Office is at the corner of Dunn and
Daphne." It is not wonderful that Daphne herself, foreseeing these
things, did not stay, but lifted her laurels somewhat nearer
Tempe,--although there are those of us who like to fancy that she is
here all the time in our Daphne-street magic: the fire bell, the tulip
beds, and the twilight bonfires. For how else, in all reason, has the
name persisted?
Of late a new doctor has appeared--one may say, has abounded: a surgeon
who, such is his zeal, will almost perform an operation over the
telephone and, we have come somewhat cynically to believe, would prefer
doing so to not operating at all. As Calliope Marsh puts it:--
"He is great on operations, that little doctor. Let him go into any
house, an' some o' the family, seems though, has to be operated on,
usually inside o' twelve hours. It'll get so that as soon as he strikes
the front porch, they'll commence sterilizin' water. I donno but some'll
go an' put on the tea-kettle if they even see him drive past."
_Why_ within twelve hours, we wonder when we hear the edict? Why never
fourteen hours, or six? How does it happen that no matter at what stage
of the malady the new doctor is called, the patient always has to be
operated on within twelve hours? Is it that everybody has a bunch and
goes about not knowing it until he appears? Or is he a kind of basanite
for bunches, and do they come out on us at the sight of him? There are
those of us who almost hesitate to take his hand, fearing that he will
fix us with his eye, point somewhere about, and tell us, "Within twelve
hours, _if_ you want your life your own." But in spite of his skill and
his modernity, in our midst there persist those who, in a scientific
night, would die rather than risk our advantages.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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