"Pooh, pshaw, don't you tell _me_, Doc., he's as crazy as a bedbug," said Mrs. Botlisch coolly. "It's a pity about that young Peters' folks being that way, so many of 'em, ain't it?" CHAPTER SEVEN It will be seen that, by the close of their period, Doctor Vardaman had grown to be pretty familiar in the Pallinder household. Mazie professed a prodigious admiration for him. "He does say the cutest things!" she remarked enthusiastically. But Mazie's attitude toward the other sex was never anything but that of complete appreciation. I have seen her turn her eyes on the coloured butler when commanding a fresh relay of waffles with an expression to draw from him rubies, let alone waffles! Her liking for the doctor was perhaps as sincere a sentiment as she could harbour; who could forbear a fondness for that genial, tolerant, grey-headed satirist? In him were to be found all the strangely dissonant yet most manly qualities of his generation. In the early eighties there was still extant a tribe of hearty old gentlemen who wore black silk stocks, swore freely, and knew Henry Clay. You may see their strong humorous faces, shirt-frills, and waving forelocks upon scores of cracked canvases in how many Middle-Western homes! Grandfather rode circuit with Swayne and Tom Ewing; he sat in Congress with that Southern statesman of whom it was said that when he took snuff all South Carolina sneezed. Perhaps he remembered Chapultepec and the heights of Monterey; it is likely that he surveyed the first turnpike, designed the first Courthouse, performed the first mastoid operation in the State, in the country. In all things I think he played a man's part, and maybe something more, without any heroics; I knew many of him, and it cannot be denied that he would sometimes get a sheet in the wind's eye, and tell robustly indecorous stories after the second glass of whisky-punch sitting around the hearth of a winter's evening. There was that one about the English visitor at Niagara, who, being conducted around the place by the guide, out to the little tower on Table Rock, and down on the _Maid of the Mist_ like everyone else, wrote his name in the guests' book, and a conundrum: "Why am I like Desdemona? Because----" But, at this point, by an ingenious manoeuvre, someone invariably called me from the room! And, strange to say, I was not suffered to return; Desdemona was in the nature of a prelude, I suspect. We have changed all that; who so plain-spoken as the lady-novelist of to-day, whom everybody reads, and, what is more, discusses? Who so wise as our young people? Nobody would be at the pains to banish them from the room. They would not laugh at or with grandpa; they would only wonder a little and pity him. They are all gone, all these humane old lads with their whisky-punches, their dreadful old fly-blown anecdotes, their extraordinary, innocent coarseness of mind. The type has vanished from among us, extinct like