Mrs. Strobe and Isabel stood and stared at the point where they had vanished, until they could no longer hear the regular hoof-beats, growing ever fainter and fainter; but Marcella still turned the relic of the spring weavings in her hand, and took pensive note of the autumn in its riddled and void meshes. Isabel spoke first. “That thar stranger air the curiousest man of all the men ez hev ever been ter this house,” she observed oracularly, as if she were a competent judge of “curiousness,” and a connoisseur in human bric-à-brac. Her grandmother chuckled. “An’ that’s a bold sayin’,” commented the little old cynic. XII. The mists continued to press close about the little cabin. The sunless day hardly gave evidence how it was wearing on, so imperceptibly did the shadows grow less gray. Some movement there was in the dense folds of the opaque vapors, for now even the vines on the porch were invisible, and anon all their leaves were abnormally definite on the blank white surface of the background. A continuous drip sounded from the eaves, but otherwise the world seemed strangely silent, until the mincing footfalls of a pacing nag came dull and muffled along the dank turn-row, and announced to Mrs. Strobe the approach of old Dr. Boyce. “Now, ain’t it a blessin’,” she observed to her granddaughters, “ez that thar perverse old man never tuk it inter that head o’ his’n—an’ it’s full o’ notions—ter kem no earlier. He mought hev met the t’ other feller, an’ thar’s nuthin’ in this worl’ one doctor hates like another one. An’ ef ’twarn’t fur the law ez keeps ’em off’n one another, thar’d be mo’ scatterin’ o’ brains, an’ hair, an’ bones round graveyards ’n thar be now. Ef ye want ter see one o’ ’em take a fit, jes’ let him know some other doctor hev been meddlin’ with his patient, ez he calls it. A mighty good word fur it, too. Patient he air,—the feller hev got ter learn patience, sure! This hyar old man can’t abide it, ef he ain’t allowed ter pizen folks his own way; an’ ef ye don’t foller his directions edzac’ly, he’ll gin the case up. An’ then ye mought git well, stiddier dyin’ respectably, ’cordin’ ter the doctor’s prescriptions.” She rose, with her speciously grave expression puckering her thin lips, and went to meet him on the porch, as he came up the path, with his saddle-bags over his arm. “Good-mornin’, doctor,” she observed, with great suavity.