Two infants in January had had scarlet fever; so much for the infants and the fever. A boy had had measles; an assessment for measles. A girl had had mumps; the price of mumps. An old lady, going one bitter February afternoon to her hen-house to see whether the hens had begun to lay, had slipped on the ice-covered step and had fractured her hip-bone; damages for the friable hip-bone of the senile. A negro man, stationed in an ice-house to knock to pieces with an axe the blocks of ice as they were hauled from the pond, had had his feet frost-bitten. In April a stable-boy had been kicked in the groin and bitten in the shoulder by a stallion. This stallion, in whom survived the fighting traits of the wild horse and defiance of man as an enemy who had no use for him but to enslave him and work him to death, had already killed two stablemen. Too valuable for the stud to be himself killed, and too dangerous to be approached or handled, it was decided to destroy his eyesight; and the doctor had been called in to treat both stable-boy and stallion. There was a bill for his services to the boy; none for the stallion; he was not a veterinary. But it was his hand that had jabbed the long needle into those virile unconquerable eyes--leaving that Samson Agonistes of the herd whose only crime had been to reject civilization, as was his right. There was no one to put out the doctor's eyes, who also had rejected civilization: which was not his right. In June a lad, climbing a cherry tree with the ambition to capture the earliest cherries dangling scarlet, had fallen flat upon his back when the limb had split from the half-rotten trunk, thus jarring his spine. It was a bad case; he must now make out a good bill for it, otherwise the father would feel resentful. In harvest time one of his friends, a young farmer, overheated, went bathing too soon in a fresh-water pond--made cooler by a recent hail-storm; between the leaves lay a note from his widow, with its deep black border and its mourning perfume; she had asked for the account--had asked punctiliously to pay for a beloved young husband's fatal chill. In autumn two barefoot half-grown brothers were cutting ironweeds in a pasture with hemphooks; the elder by too heavy a stroke had sent his blade clean through a clump of weeds into the ankle of the younger, slashing it to the bone. Thus the record ran on as the doctor turned the pages in a preliminary survey of his chart of suffering. And then there were the cases of those coming into the world and the cases of those going out: birth-rates, death-rates. He must exact of Nature his fee for continuing the existence of the human race; and he must go about among his friends and neighbors and wring money out of them because those they loved best had merely paid their own decent debt to mortality.