"Well, don't I know you?" "Do you? I wish you did." Up in the branches something stirred. It may have been Cupid--probably it was. But silence followed this conversational effort--a silence broken by a great heaving sigh, mostly of excitement, and the strains of the band which drifted out of the windows of the College Hall. And over them both, as over all other men and women, young and old, at the beginning and at the end, hung the moon and the stars. How good it is to be young and in love! VI Unnoticed by Mrs. Guthrie and her two boys, there was something more than a little pathetic in the Doctor's eager, wistful attitude toward the rather thoughtless, high-spirited, seething youth in the middle of which he found himself for the first time. This man had never been young. The atmosphere of the farm on which he had been born killed youth as foul air kills a caged bird. Poverty, sordidness and the grim, constant struggle to live made his childhood and early days utterly devoid of the good sweet things. His mother, worn out and dispirited, died in giving him birth, and his father, bitter, lonely and filled with the irony that comes from a long and unprofitable hand-to-hand fight with mother-earth, let him bring himself up. He was turned out to work at a time when most lads are sent to school. He had to trudge daily into the straggling, one-eyed town, at an early hour, to report at the chemist's store where he obtained employment as an errand boy. Most of the small wages he earned were required by his father. From almost the very beginning life was to him a sort of whirling stream into which he had been flung before having been taught to swim. Mere self-preservation demanded that he should keep himself afloat. He picked up education as a stray dog picks up an occasional bone. There was, however, great grit in this boy and deep down in his soul an ambition to become something better than his father, whose daily wrestle with nature--the most relentless of task-mistresses--had warped his character and stultified his soul. Young Hunter shuddered at the thought of living always on the farm, of grubbing in the earth, of planting and hoeing and reaping, of facing the almost inevitable tragedy of spoiled crops and ruined hopes, and the yearly set-backs of advancing freights and higher wages. He looked with growing horror and detestation at the farm implements among which his father spent his life; and while he ran his errands, carrying medicines and soda syphons, he nursed a dream in his little cold heart, which grew out of the smell of medicines and the talk of illness that was all about him in the chemist store. It was to become a doctor and tend the needs of humanity and, if it was in his power, to save to other children the mothers who brought them into being.