"He was always doing it," said his daughter, "and my mother used to worry over it. She declared that of all things earthly, papa loved an unfortunate person; the greater the misfortune, the greater his care." In illustration of his easy and practically controlling attitude toward the very well-to-do, who were his patients also, let me narrate this: In our town was an old and very distinguished colonel, comparatively rich and very crotchety, who had won considerable honors for himself during the Civil War. He was a figure, and very much looked up to by all. People were, in the main, overawed by and highly respectful of him. A remote, stern soul, yet to Dr. Gridley he was little more than a child or schoolboy--one to be bossed on occasion and made to behave. Plainly, the doctor had the conviction that all of us, great and small, were very much in need of sympathy and care, and that he, the doctor, was the one to provide it. At any rate, he had known the colonel long and well, and in a public place--at the principal street corner, for instance, or in the postoffice where we school children were wont to congregate--it was not at all surprising to hear him take the old colonel, who was quite frail now, to task for not taking better care of himself--coming out, for instance, without his rubbers, or his overcoat, in wet or chilly weather, and in other ways misbehaving himself. "There you go again!" I once heard him call to the colonel, as the latter was leaving the postoffice and he was entering (there was no rural free delivery in those days) "--walking around without your rubbers, and no overcoat! You want to get me up in the night again, do you?" "It didn't seem so damp when I started out, Doctor." "And of course it was too much trouble to go back! You wouldn't feel that way if you couldn't come out at all, perhaps!" "I'll put 'em on! I'll put 'em on! Only, please don't fuss, Doctor. I'll go back to the house and put 'em on." The doctor merely stared after him quizzically, like an old schoolmaster, as the rather stately colonel marched off to his home. Another of his patients was an old Mr. Pegram, a large, kind, big-hearted man, who was very fond of the doctor, but who had an exceedingly irascible temper. He was the victim of some obscure malady which medicine apparently failed at times to relieve. This seemed to increase his irritability a great deal, so much so that the doctor had at last discovered that if he could get Mr. Pegram angry enough the malady would occasionally disappear. This seemed at times as good a remedy as any, and in consequence he was occasionally inclined to try it.