About all these to us strange coins and values the schoolmaster was expected to know, and to be able also to instruct his scholars. He filled, therefore, a very important place in the life of the village, as well as in the experience of the boys under his instruction. Nowhere to-day can you find in village schoolmaster, district or town school teacher, superintendent of instruction, or learned professor, a figure that fills out and continues just the portrait of the typical pedagogue of a generation or more ago. Next after the village schoolmaster, and perhaps outranking him in prominence and in distinctive traits, and so deserving to have been mentioned sooner, was the “Country Doctor” of the past generation. Wherever men live, meet with accidents, suffer sickness, grow old and die, there in civilized lands the physician is a necessity, and is always to be found. Favored as we are in the present by all the progress in medical and sanitary science, and attended by the skilled physicians of to-day, we can hardly realize the life of the doctor and of the patient in the time many of the remedies which are now used to relieve pain were unknown, when there were no drug stores except in the larger towns, when only a few simple medicines could be easily obtained at the village store, along with the tea, sugar, calico, twine and garden seeds that made up the stock on the shelves. Then the physician compounded his own drugs, rolled out his own pills, made his own tinctures, weighed or measured out his own prescriptions, and carried with him on his round of calls, and perhaps in his saddle-bags, a most varied and astonishing assortment of medicines, a list of which would be remarkable to-day, alike for the presence of many that are abandoned, and for the absence of still more that are now in common and constant use. The physician of to-day excels him perhaps in general knowledge, in ability to deal with difficult diseases, and to perform delicate and successful surgery. He is the man of wider reading and more scientific views; he is possibly the better practitioner; but he is by no means the distinct character in his way that the country doctor of fifty years ago was.