LET me tell the worst of the Little Red Doctor at once and get it over with. He has a hair-trigger temper and a jaw that does not forget or forgive readily. He insists on regarding gravely many things which most of us treat flippantly, such as love and death. He has a brutal disregard of the finesse of illness and never gives, even to an old man and an old patient like myself, medicine unless one needs it. For the rest, the nickname which Our Square gave him long since describes him. One thing more; though he is our friend and fellow and counselor, the safe repository of our secrets, our sturdy defender against the final enemy, yet Our Square does not call him “Doc.” There is something about him which forbids. You would have to see him to understand. Seeing him, you would not see very much. Nature has done a slack job with the Little Red Doctor's outside. Even the Bonnie Lassie, stickler though she is for the eminence of nature as an artist, heretically admits this. She tried to better it in sculpture, and by force of the genius in her slim fingers she did succeed in getting at the dominant meaning of those queer quirks in his queer face--quirks of humor, of compassion, of sympathy--and thereby in expressing something of his fiery tenderness, his intrepid wisdom, his inclusive charity of heart toward good and bad alike, the half-boyish, half-knightly valor of self-sacrifice which arms him in the lists for the endless combat with his unconquerable antagonist, “my old friend, Death.” With her happy sense of character she called her miniature bronze “The Idealist,” and refused to sell it because, she said, some day Our Square would want to put up a monument to the Little Red Doctor and her attempt might help some bigger artist to be worthy of the task. “Do you know,” she observed to Cyrus the Gaunt the day that she finished, “I've discovered something about that face? There's no happiness in it. And it so deserves happiness!” “Some fool of a girl probably turned him down and he came here to bury himself,” surmised Cyrus the Gaunt. “We homely, good men are never properly appreciated. Look at me!” The Bonnie Lassie looked at him and then kissed him on the ear. “Just the same I think you're wrong,” she said thoughtfully. “When I first saw the Little Red Doctor, I wondered whether any woman could possibly love him. Since I've known him I've wondered how any woman could possibly help it.” “That's a pleasant thing for a man to hear from his wife,” observed Cyrus cheerfully. “Anyway, there's a photograph been scraped out of the inside of his watch. Mendel, the watchmaker, told Polyglot Elsa so.”