The door opened slowly; and there entered a middle-aged, rather grizzled man, with shaggy eyebrows, sparse beard, and bent shoulders. He glanced in hesitatingly, his eyes wandering down to Darcy. "I declare to man!" and he stared hard, with the door-knob still in his hand. "Jack Darcy! I heard you were home. How d'y do? How d'y do?" and he wrung the hand warmly. "I'm powerful glad to see you," and he looked him slowly over, from head to foot. "Why, you've grown, or something! What a great giant you are!--Morning, doctor," nodding rather incidentally to Maverick. "So you've had a long tramp, Jack? Your mother brought some of the letters over to my old lady, who has been rather poorly the last two months. Why, you could set up book-writing! Well, what's the good word? Can't be like Yerbury all over." "There are too many towns full of idle people, if that is what you mean. But it was splendid, Cameron! I have one more dream,--to go up and down the Western coast, and over the Rocky Mountains; but I want to digest this first. I have no fancy for mental dyspepsia," and he gave a good, wholesome laugh. "The right way, Jack," nodded Maverick, with a shrewd twinkle in his eye. "Well, you've come back to a dull place,--a dull place," and Cameron shook his head despondingly. "We used to be main proud of old Yerbury; but--is the whole world to go on and starve to death, with such crops, and such an abundance of every thing?" "We are going to weather it through, Cameron," Jack answered with a stubborn hopefulness. "There have been hard times before that have ended in renewed prosperity." "Yes. There was '57; hard enough, Heaven knows, with the banks going to smash everywhere. It ruined my father. And way back in '37, when there was such a wild-fire about real estate, and it came out just as this has. Do people ever learn by experience, Maverick?" and the man gave a short, unmirthful chuckle. "You could buy up half Yerbury to-day, for taxes and mortgages. I can't, for the life of me, see how it all came about. And that it has gone all over the world,--well, human nature in England or Germany can't well laugh at human nature in this country.--Are these things like cholera and fevers, doctor, taking a clean sweep once in a while?" and Cameron gave a twist to the end of his faded beard, as if he might wring the secret out of it. "We have learned to manage the cholera, and see in it, not a dispensation of Providence, but the natural result of filth and greed and carelessness. Darcy and I are getting up a panacea now," with a bright little laugh. "But how is Mrs. Cameron? Is her medicine out?" "Yes;" and Cameron drew a phial from his pocket. "You don't think it would do to stop here? She's pretty well, I should say;" and he fingered the bottle as if he were debating whether to have it filled or not.