Following in the direction of the voices, I came to a dark, low-ceilinged room with a pine bed, on which lay a withered-looking woman with sparsely lashed eyelids and fine, straight, straw-colored hair. Near her was a small oblong bundle, wrapped round with a bright patch-work quilt; and out of this bundle a cry issued. As I peered into it, a red weazened face stared back at me, the eyes opening startlingly round. I looked long in wonder. The woman sighed; and, my gaze reverting to her, I thought suddenly of what a neighbor had once said to my father, "Selma Perkins used to be the prettiest girl in school. She was like the first arbutus flowers." Surely this woman with her pallid skin and her faded spiritless eyes could not have been the one they meant! There was some talk between my Father and his patient, the gist of which I could not get, absorbed as I was with the face inside the patch-work quilt. We went out silently, after I had taken a last, long look into the bundle.--Lisbeth had come into my world. * * * * * Some twenty years were to go by before I was to realize the significance of the scene that I had witnessed that winter morning at the old frame farmhouse. It was the year of my return to America with Jim Shepherd, whose career as a rising young painter had just begun to be heralded, that I felt impelled to revisit the place of my childhood. Not my least interest lay in seeing Lisbeth again. I remembered her as a fragile upstanding girl of twelve with soft hair the color of dead leaves and gray inquiring eyes. But whatever it was that I was to find I was conscious that I would see it with new appreciation of values. For if my eight years of medical work abroad had sharpened my discernment, even more had my intimacy with Jim Shepherd swept my mind clean of prejudice and casuistry. To strangers Jim must often have appeared naive and undevious. The fact was that his passion for truth-probing and his worship of the undiscovered loveliness of life had obscured whatever self-consciousness had been born in him. Meeting him for the first time was like entering another element. It left you a little flat. That candor and eagerness of his at first balked you, it made negligible your traditions of thought and speech. One ended by loving him.