"Where are you running off to?" he asked, pretending not to remember that permission had been granted weeks before, as soon as the bills had been pasted on turnpike fences. "We're running off to the circus!" "And what can you possibly be going to do at the circus? Children go to a circus--who ever heard of such a thing! I should think you'd have stayed at home and studied arithmetic or memorized the capitals of all the States." "Well, as for me," cried Elsie, "I'm pleased to explain what I shall do: I shall drink lemonade and sit with the fat woman if there's room for both of us on the same plank!" "And what are _you_ going to do?" "I'm going to do _everything_, of course! That's my ticket: I don't pay for all and see some! I'm going to do everything." "Everything is a good deal," commented the doctor introspectively. "Everything is a good deal; but do what you can toward it--as you have paid the price." For a while he mused how childhood wants all of whatever it craves: its desire is as single as its eye. Only later in life we come to know--or had better know--that we may have the whole of very little: that a small part of anything is our wisest portion, and the instant anything becomes entirely ours, it becomes lost to us or we become lost to it: the bright worlds that last for ages revolve--they do not collide. He was still thinking of this when he met the carriage of Professor Ousley; and the two middle-aged friends, who in their lives had never passed each other on the road without stopping, stopped now. Professor Ousley got out and came across to the doctor's buggy and greeted him with fresh concerned cordiality. "It has come at last," he announced, as though something long talked of between them could be thus referred to; and he drew out a letter which he handed in to be read; it was a call to a professorship in a Northern university. As the doctor read it and reread it (continuing to read because he did not know what to say)--as he thus read, he began to look like a man grown ill. "You have accepted, of course," he said barely. "I have accepted." The friends were silent with their faces turned in the same direction across the country--their land, the land of generations of their people. This breaking up would be the end for them of the near tie of soil and tradition and boyhood friendship and the friendship of manhood. "Well," said the doctor unsteadily, "this is what you have been working for." "This is what I have been working for," assented Professor Ousley. These intermediate years had wrought their changes in him also; within and without; he was grown heavy, and as an American scholar he had weight. The doctor clung for safety to his one theme:--