Some one of the world's greatest painters, chancing to enter, might

worthily have desired to paint him--putting no questions as to who the

man was or what he was; or what darkening or brightening history

stretched behind him; or what entanglement of right and wrong lay around

and within: painting only the unmistakable human signs he witnessed, and

leaving his portrait for thousands of people to look at afterwards and

make out of it what they could--through kinship with the good and evil

in themselves: Velasquez, with his brush moving upon those areas of

lonely struggle which sometimes lie with their wrecks at the bottom of

the sea of human eyes; Franz Hals, fixing the cares which hover too long

around our mouths; Vandyck, sitting in the shadow of the mystery that

slants across all mortal shoulders; Rembrandt, drawn apart into the

dignity that invests colossal disappointment. Any merciless, masterful

limner of them all in a mood to portray those secret passions which

drive men, especially men of middle age, towards safer deeps upon the

rocks.

He had a well-set soldierly figure and the swarthy roughened face that

results from years of exposure to weather--a face looking as if inwardly

scarred by the tempests of his character but unwrinkled by the outer

years. Both face and figure breathed the silent impassiveness of the

regular who has been through campaigns enough already but is enlisted

for life and for whatsoever duty may bring; he standing there in some

wise palpably draped in the ideals of his profession as the soldier

keeps his standard waving high somewhere near his tent, to remind him of

the greatness that he guards and of the greatness that guards him.

Not a tall man as men grow on that Kentucky plateau; and looking less

than his stature by reason of being so strongly built, square-standing,

ponderous; his muscles here and there perceivable under his loosely

fitting sack-suit of dark-gray tweeds; so that out of respect for

strength which is both manhood and manliness, your eye travelled

approvingly over his proportions: measuring the heavy legs down to the

boots; the heavy arms out to the wrists; the heavy square thick muscular

warm hands; and the heavy torso up to the short neck rising full out of

a low turned-down collar.

In this neck an animal wildness and virile ferocity--not subdued, not

stamped out, partly tamed by a will. Overtopping this neck a tremendous

head covered with short glossy black hair, curling blue-black hair. In

this head a powerful blunt nose, set like the muzzle of a big gun

pointed to fire a heavy projectile at a distant target--the nose of a

never-releasing tenacity. Above this nose, right and left, thick black

brows, the bars of nature's iron purpose. Under these brows wonderful

grayish eyes with glints of Scotch blue in them or of Irish blue or of

Saxon blue; for the blood of three races ran thick in his veins and

mingled in the confusions of his character: blue that was in the eyes of

earlier Scottish men, exulting in heather and highland stag; or the blue

of other eyes that had looked meltingly on golden-haired minstrel and

gold-framed harp--eyes that might have poured their love into Isolde's

or have faded out in the death of Tristan; or the blue of still other

eyes--archers who had shot their last arrows and, dying, drew themselves

to the feet of Harold, their blue-eyed king fighting for Saxon England's

right and might.

They were eyes that could look you to the core with intelligence and

then rest upon you from the outside with sympathy for all that he had

seen to be human in you whether of strength or of weakness--but never of

meanness. Under the blunt nose a thick stubby mustache trimmed short,

leaving exposed the whole red mouth--the mouth of great passions--no

paltry passions--none despicable or contemptible.

On the whole a man who advances upon you with all there is in him and

without waiting for you to advance upon him; no stepping aside for

people in this world by this man, nor stepping timidly over things. Even

as he stood there a motionless figure, he diffused an influence most

warm and human, gay and tragic, irresistible. A man loved secretly or

openly by many women. A man that men were glad to come to confide in,

when they crossed the frontiers of what Balzac, speaking of the soldiers

of Napoleon, called their miserable joys and joyous miseries.

But assuredly not a man to be put together by piecemeal description such

as this: the very secret of his immense influence being some charm of

mystery, as there is mystery in all the people that win us and rule us

and hold us; as though we pressed our ear against this mystery and

caught there the sound of a meaning vaster than ourselves--not meant for

us but flowing away from us along the unbroken channels of the universe:

still to be flowing there long after we ourselves are stilled.

* * * * *

Thus he stood in his library that morning when his son left him, brought

to a stop in the road of life as by a straw fallen at his feet borne on

a rising wind--another harbinger of a coming storm.

By and by not far away a door on that side of the house was slammed. The

sound of muffled feet was heard on the porch and then the laughter of

children as they bounded across the yard. As his ear caught the noises,

he hurried to the window and looked out; and then he threw up the sash

and hailed them loudly:--

"Ho, there! you winter snow-birds without wings!"

As the children wheeled and paused, he smiled and shook his

forefinger:--

"Remember to keep those two red mouths closed and to breathe through

those two red noses!" and then as he recalled some exercises which he

had lately been putting them through, he added with ironic emphasis,

laughing the while:--

"And when you breathe, remember to bring into play those two invaluable

little American diaphragms and those two priceless pairs of American

ribs!"

The little girl nodded repeatedly to indicate that she could understand

if she would and would obey if she cared; and putting her red-mittened

finger-tips to her lips, she threw him a good-by with a wide sweeping

gesture of the arms to right and left. And the boy made a soldierly

salute, touching a hand to his skull-cap with the uncouth rigor of a

veteran in the raw: then they bounded off again.

The doctor drew down the sash and watched them.

A hundred yards from the house the ground sloped to a limestone spring

at the foot of the hill--a characteristic Kentucky formation. From this

spring issued a brook, on the banks of which stood a clump of forest

trees, bathing their roots in the moisture. Upon reaching the brow of

this hill, the boy lagged behind his sister as though to elude her

observation; then turning looked back at his father--looked but made no

sign: a little upright pillar of life on the brow of that declivity:

then he dropped out of sight.

A few moments later up over the hill where he was last seen a little

cloud of autumn leaves came scurrying. As they neared the wall of the

house where the wind by pressure veered skyward to clear the roof, some

of the leaves were caught up and dashed against the windowpanes behind

which the doctor was standing. Had the sash been raised, they would have

thrown themselves into his arms and have clung to his neck and breast.

He did not know why, but they caused him a pang: those little brown

parchments torn from the finished volume of the year: they caused him a

subtle pang.

He turned from the window, goaded by more than resolution, and crossed

to his writing-desk on the opposite side: there lay the work mapped out

for the morning. No interruptions were to be expected from his patients,

though of course there might be new patients since accidents and

illnesses befall unheralded. There would be no visitors--not to-day. In

a country of the warmest social customs and of family ties so widely

interknit that whole communities are bound together as with vine-like

closeness, no one visits on the day before Christmas. In every little

town the world of people crowd the streets and shops or busy themselves

in preparations at home: out in the country those who have not flocked

to the towns are as joyously occupied. No visitors, then. And the

children were gone--no disturbances from their romping. The servants had

put his rooms in order, and were too discreetly trained to return upon

their paths.

After breakfast, at the stable, he had given orders to his man for the

day while he was having a look at his horses--well-stalled,

well-groomed, docile, intelligent: at his gaited saddle-horse, at the

nag for his buggy, at the perfectly matched pair for his carriage. As he

appeared in the doorway of the stalls, each beast, turning his head, had

sent to him its affectionate greeting out of eyes that looked like wells

of soft blue smoke: each said, "Take me to-day."

He was a little vain of being weatherwise, as is apt to be the case with

country-bred folk: and at the last stable door, having studied the wind

and the sky and the temperature, he had said to his man that the weather

was changing: it would be snowing by afternoon. Usually in that latitude

the first flurry of snow gladdens the eye near Thanksgiving, but sleighs

are not often flying until late in December. There had been no snow as

yet; it was due, and the weather showed signs of its multitudinous

onset.

He felt so sure in his forecast that he had instructed his man to put

the sleigh in readiness. He himself went into the saddle-house and from

a peg amid the gear and harness he took down the sleighbells. As he

shook them roughly, he smiled as above that cascade of mellow winter

sounds there settled a little cloud of summer dust. He observed that the

leather needed mending--what he called "a few surgical stitches"; and he

had brought the bells with him to the house and they now lay on the

floor of his office in the adjoining room.

He thought that if it should snow heavily enough he would use the sleigh

when he started out in the afternoon. There were several sick children

to visit on opposite horizons of his neighborhood. The sound of the

bells as he drove in at their front gates might have value: it would not

only mean the coming of his sleigh, but it would suggest to them the

approach of that mysterious Sleigh of the World which that night they

were expecting. Afterwards he was to go to a distant county seat for a

consultation. His road home was a straight turnpike: it would be late

when he returned, perhaps far in the night; and he would have the sound

of the bells to himself--the bells and his thoughts and Christmas Eve.

This plan of Dr. Birney's regarding the children laid bare one of his

ideas as a physician. For years he had employed increasingly in his

practice the power of suggestion. For years life as he sometimes

surmised had employed the power of suggestion on him. He felt assured

that in treating the sick there are cases where every suggestion of

happiness that can reach a patient draws him back toward life: every

suggestion of unhappiness lowers his vitality and helps to roll him over

the precipice: the final push need be a very slight one. The melody of

sleighbells falling on the ears of the sick children that afternoon

might have the weight of a sunbeam on delicate scales and tip the

balances as he wished: he believed that many a time the weight of a

mental sunbeam was all that was needed to decide the issue.

He looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock, and dinner was served at

one, and he had a tranquil outlook for three hours of work. The only

remaining source from which an interruption could have reached him was

his wife. His wife!--his wife never--intruded.

Not three hours, but two hours and a half, to be exact; for the

dining-room adjoined his library, and every day at half past twelve

o'clock his wife entered the dining-room to superintend final

preparations for dinner: from the instant of her entrance concentration

of mind ended for him: he occupied himself with things less important

and with odds and ends for mind and body.

She would draw the shades of the windows delicately to temper the light

according as the day was cloudy or cloudless; she would bring fresh

flowers for the table; she would inspect the clearness of the cut glass,

the brightness of the silver, the snowiness of the napkins; she would

prepare at the sideboard a salad, a sauce; she would give a final push

to the chairs--last of all a straightening push to his. All the lower

drudgery of the servants and all the higher domestic triumphs of her

skill led to his chair--as to a kind of throne where the function of

feeding reigned. With that final adjustment of the piece of furniture in

which his body was to be at ease while it gorged itself, with that act

of grade, the doors were opened; dinner was announced; he walked in, and

faced his wife, and dined--with Nemesis.

This pride of hers in housekeeping was part of her inheritance, of the

civilization of her land and people: it was a little separate dynasty of

itself. Often as the years had gone by he had been thankful that she

could thus far find compensation for larger disappointment; it helped to

keep her a healthy woman if it could not render her a happy wife. Near

the sugar and the flour she could perhaps three times a day realize

small perfections; she could mould little ideals and turn them out on

the shelf and verify them with a silver spoon: an ideal life in the

pantry for a woman who had expected an ideal life with him in library

and parlor and bedroom and out in the world. It was all as if she sat at

the base of Love's ruined Pyramids and tried to divert her desolation by

configuring ant hills.

And he was well aware that this pride of housekeeping was the least of

all the prides that grouped themselves around that central humiliation

of wifehood. He had sometimes thought that if, after her death, over her

were planted a weeping willow, mere nutritive pride in her dust would

force the boughs to reverse their natural direction and shoot upward as

stiff as a spruce.

The dining-room, in the old-fashioned Kentucky way, was richly carpeted;

but the moment she set her foot within it, he could trace her steps as

unerringly as though she had been shod with explosives. Likewise she

sang to herself a good deal: (he had long ago diagnosed that symptom of

nervous self-consciousness).

When he had married her, voice and piano had been one of the resources

he thought he would hold in reserve for the emptying years; music would

fill so much rational silence. It was one of his semi-serious

declarations that only two people more or less out of their senses could

keep on talking to each other till death forced them to hold their

tongues. But with tragic swiftness and sureness a few years after their

marriage the music stopped, the piano was shut.

More than that terminated. After two children were born, there were no

more: that profound living music came to an end also. And perhaps one of

the deepest desires of his nature was for that kind of long union with

his wife and for many children: perhaps the only austerity in him was an

austere patriarchal authority to people the earth and to bequeath the

inheritance of it to his seed.

When she had ceased singing to him soon after marriage, she had begun to

sing to herself--habitually during this half-hour of proximity. The

sound took up a fixed abode in his ear as there is a roaring in a

seashell. He could hear it miles across the country; it was the loudest

sound to him in this world--that barely audible self-conscious singing

of his wife.

During this interval also she addressed her commands to the maid in

tones lowered not to disturb him. He could not hear the words, but there

was no mistaking the tones! What beautiful, eager, victorious, thrilling

tones--over a dish of steaming vegetables--over a savory toast! They

forced him to be reminded that the nature of his wife was not a brook

run dry; its leaping waters were merely turned away into another

channel. Only when she spoke with him did the cadence of her tones sag;

then all the modulations ran downhill as into some inner pit of

emptiness.

It was impossible for him to believe that the occasional chuckle and

cackle of the maid during these whispered colloquies grew out of

aspersions winged at him--at the hungry ogre, middle-aged, almost

corpulent, on the other side of the wall; at the species of advanced

gorilla, poorly disguised in collar and necktie and midway garments;

and with wool and leather drawn over his lower pair of modernized

walking hands! Yet the truth was undeniable that when dinner was

announced and he went in, the maid, standing behind her mistress's

chair, fixed her gaze on him with fresh daily delight in understanding

or misunderstanding the wretchedness of the household.

The first time he had ever seen this maid was one evening upon going in

to supper. They were expecting guests, and his wife wore an evening

gown. As he seated himself, he became aware almost without glancing

across the table that something novel had arrived upon the

scene--something youthful yet as immemorial as Erebus. Behind the

glistening whiteness of his wife's bust with its cold proud dignity,

there was something sable--birdlike--all beak and eyes--with a small

head on which grew a kind of ruffled indignant feathers. He tried to

take no further notice of the apparition, but could not escape the

experience that several times during the meal he rescued his biscuit as

from between the claws of a competing raven.

In the course of time, as this combination of black and white refused to

dissolve and rather coalesced into a duality holding good for meal

hours, he felt impelled to characterize the alliance--to envisage for

his own relief the totality of its comic gloom. So he called it his

_Bust of Pallas_ and his _Nevermore_. And his _Nevermore_, perched

behind his _Bust of Pallas_ at every function, fixed her dull stupid

eyes on him in unceasing judgment. He was never quite persuaded of the

human reality of her; never fully believed that she reached to the

carpet: and he never got up from the table to see whether she cast a

shadow on the floor; but he knew that it was the fowl's intention to

cast whatsoever shadow it carried about with it _upon him_.

She had become a critic of his domestic relations. This servant, this

mal-arrangement of beak and eyes, with bare brain enough not to let

plates fall and not to dangle her fingers in scalding water nor singe

her head-feathers in the oven--this servant of his arraigned _him_ in

his humanity! And if this servant, then all his servants. And if all his

servants, then all the servants of the neighborhood. The whole Plutonian

shore croaked its black damnation of him. Of _him_!--the leading citizen

of his community, its central vital character who held in his keeping

the destiny of a people! He had a vision of the august assemblage of

them uplifted into the heavenliness of an African Walhalla--such as is

disclosed in the last act of the _Tetralogy_--all gazing down upon him

as a profaning Alberic who had raped the virgin Gold of marital love.

On a near peak of especial moral grandeur, his _Nevermore_ stood in her

supernal resentment of his wife's wrong. For whatever _Nevermore_ was

not, at least, she was woman. And what woman fails to espouse any wife's

dignity except the woman who supplants the wife? (Not even she; for if

ever in turn her hour comes, her first outcry is, 'I might have known.')

Dr. Birney did not have three hours for this morning's business, then,

but two hours and a half; and forthwith beginning, he took from his

breast-pocket a small book and transferred from it to a large diary his

notes of visits to patients on the day preceding. This soon done, he was

ready for the main work.

It was now the closing week of the year when according to custom he

posted the year's books; for he was his own secretary. By New Year's Day

his accounts were about ready and new books were opened.

He always took up with repugnance this valuation of his services. It was

to him one of life's ironies that in order to live he must take toll of

death. He must harvest his bread from the fields of tears. He must catch

his annual treasure from those rainbows of hope that spanned weary

pillows. He must fill his wine-jar by dipping his cup into the waves of

Lethe. He must equip his very stable with the ferriage he had collected

on the banks of the Styx.

His heart was never in his bookkeeping; this morning he could barely fix

upon it his thoughts; so that before commencing he allowed himself to

turn the leaves, getting a distasteful bird's-eye view of this panorama

of neighborhood suffering and mortality there outspread on the table.

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.

He dipped his pen into the ink, drew before him some blanks, and began

to make out the bills. The rooms were very quiet and comfortable; winter

sunshine entered through the windows; the Christmas wind frolicked

outside the walls.

* * * * *

To be forced to sit there and say to the world: My feelings have nothing

to do with it: you must pay what you owe! Because all life is payment;

everything is a settlement. There is but one that is exempt--Nature. It

is only she who never fails to collect a debt but who never pays one.

Who that has ever lived our common human life, borne its burdens, felt

its cares, fought against its wrongs, who but knows that Nature is in

debt to him? But what son of hers has ever been able to tear his due

from her!

* * * * *

More may be learned about the doctor by an inspection of his rooms. Of

these there were three, with a small fourth chamber as an ell in the

house: in this ell there was a single bed, and here he sometimes

slept--as nearly outside the house as it was possible to lie and still

to be within it.

The room in which he now worked was his library; communicating through

an open door was his office; beyond the office through another open door

was a third room in which were stored many personal articles of indoor

and outdoor use.

Beginning with his office, you derived the knowledge which any

physician's and surgeon's office, if modern and complete, should afford.

On one wall hung his diploma from a New York Medical College; on another

a diploma from Vienna for post-graduate study and hospital work.

The rooms taken together bore testimony in their entire equipment to a

general outside truth: that the physician who lived in them was not a

country doctor because he had been crowded by abler members of the

profession out of the cities where there are many into the country where

there are none: and this fact in turn had its larger historic

significance.

Almost within a generation a radical change has taken place in the

relation of town and country as regards the profession of medicine. The

old barriers which half a century ago separated the sick in the streets

from the sick in fields and forests have been swept away. The city

physician now twenty-five miles away can often arrive more quickly than

a country doctor who lives five; and a surgeon can come in an hour who

formerly needed half a day. But many now living with long memories can

well remember the time when the country doctor ruled in his neighborhood

as the priest in mediæval Europe swayed his parish. However remote, he

was always sent for. His form was the very image of rescue, his face was

the light of healing. As a consequence, the country often developed

leaders in the profession. Instead of its being dependent upon the

cities, these looked to the rural districts for many of the most skilful

practitioners.

This was strikingly true from the earliest settlement of the West on

that immense plateau of forest and grass land which has long since drawn

to itself the notice of the world as the loveliness of Kentucky. It was

on the southern boundary of this plateau, living in a pioneer hamlet and

practising far and wide through a wilderness, that a country doctor

became the father of ovarian surgery in the United States and won the

reverence of the world of science and the gratitude of humanity. In

another pioneer settlement one of the greatest of American lithotomists

spread the lustre of his name and the goodness of his deeds over the

whole country west of the Alleghany Mountains; and these were but two of

those many country doctors who there for well-nigh a century were the

reliance of their people: physicians, surgeons, diagnosticians, nurses,

pharmacists, friends--all in one.

This powerful and brilliant tradition had descended to Dr. Birney, and

he had worthily upheld it. In some respects he had solidly advanced it,

notably in his treatment of children's diseases.

A second room, in which the articles of his personal life were kept,

gave further knowledge of him as a man. Outside the windows there was a

tennis court; he played tennis with his children and with young people

of the neighborhood. You saw his racquet on the wall; and if you had

opened a closet, you would have found the flannels and the shoes.

Elsewhere on the wall you saw his reel. In season he liked to fish, when

his patients also could go fishing, or at least were well enough to feel

like going; and in the same closet you might have noted the residue of a

fisherman's outfit. He fished not only for black bass, but for that mild

pond and creek fish prized as a delicacy on Kentucky tables--a variety

of the calico bass known in the local vocabulary as "newlight."

Still elsewhere you saw his game bag and bird gun--he liked to call it

by the older word, fowling-piece. He hunted: quail, doves, wild duck. In

another closet you would have been interested to discover his regalia as

a member of the Order of Masons; and well placed beside it his uniform

as a member of the State Guard--the two well placed there. When years

before his neighbors had enrolled him in the Guard, they had saluted him

as one more Kentucky Colonel. "I will submit to no official

degradation," he had said; "I am already the Commander of the whole army

of you on the field of your human Waterloo: salute your General!"

His library added its testimony as to other humanities. Scattered about

on tables and mantel-piece were fine old pipes and boxes of cigars and

playing-cards. There were poker chips, showing that the doctor had poker

neighbors (where else if not there?), though whist was his game. You

realized that he was a man at home among a people who loved play--must

have play. On his sideboard were temperate decanters: he had sideboard

neighbors. Altogether a human-looking room for much that is human; easy

to enter, comfortable to stay in, hard to quit.

But our closest friends can come so close to us and no closer; they

surround us but none of them enters us. Nature forbids that any but our

own feet should cross the bridge spanning the distance between other

people and the fortress of the individual. Across that bridge we can

take with us no companions except those that keep silent amid its

silences; that can speak to us but that cannot see us: those great

voices without eyes; those great listeners without ears; great

counsellors without criticism; great hands that guide and refuse to

smite; great judges that embody law and refuse to sit in judgment on

us--Books.

Some of the doctor's books held for him life's indispensable laughter;

and no one of us ever tells all the things in this world that we laugh

at. Some held for him life's tears; and no one of us ever tells the

things that secretly start our own. Some held neither laughter nor tears

but what is above both--life's calm; and what one of us but at times

feels the need to ascend to some inner mountain-top of our own

spirits--far above the whole darkened or radiant cloud-rack of

emotion--and look futureward into the promised peace, the end of our

wandering. Joys--sorrows--and calm: these three for him, too.

Such books stayed with the doctor year after year. He could wake in the

night and find them through the darkness; in the darkness they knew how

to find him. They were not part of his medical library, of course, which

was another matter. But they filled three sides of a large low revolving

bookcase in the middle of the room beside his easy chair and his lamp

and table.

The fourth side of his bookcase held the books that came and went as a

stream, entering and passing on: he drank from them as they flowed by.

Always they were books of fiction or biography which held in solution

the truth of the human matter about some life that had fought or was

fighting its path through to victory. Always he would have books of

victory. By preference it must be a story real or imagined of some boy,

youth, young man, middle-aged man, who was in the struggle for existence

and who was on the side of survival. He kept in mind the words of a

great Frenchman that the way to make an impression upon the world is to

plough through humanity like a cannon-ball or to creep through it like a

pestilence. But he knew that in this world there are very few human

cannonballs, though of such pestilence there is always more than enough.

Rather every common man's life, and every uncommon man's life, is a

drawn sword that has to cut its way through all other drawn swords. Here

were the books which disclosed the mettle of a character: the last

magnificent refusal to be ruined by evil which is the very breath of a

man and the slow measure of the world's advance. So that, while much is

always failing in everybody, all is never failing. Out of the blackest

abyss there arises in the wounded and prostrate some white peak of

unmelting innocence--at the base of which Life's battle rages.

Many a time long after midnight he would read to a finish some such

triumphant story; and with a murmur of "Well done!" he would close the

book, turn out his lamp, and go to sleep in his chair with his clothes

on--with that scene of victory emptying its echoes into his ear and his

dreams.

Here, then, was some discrete knowledge of the doctor as a doctor and as

a man. But there was one thing in his library that blended these two

separate aspects, showing how the man felt as a physician and how the

physician felt as a man. This was a series of pictures running around

the walls and connecting great epochs in the progress of Medicine.

He had a liking, as the world has, for some brief series of climaxes

that will depict a subject at a glance. Very memorable to him was

Shakespeare's Seven Ages--because they were seven and were thus easily

grasped by poetry and reason. But he knew that Shakespeare might as

truly have substituted another seven--with as good poetry and reason; or

he might have made the ages fourteen or forty-nine or forty-nine

hundred; for actually the ages of a man's life are infinite; but being

reduced to seven, we all recognize them.

And memorable to him likewise had been Hogarth's _Progress of the Rake_

with its few pictures; and his _Progress of the Harlot_ with its few;

and his _Progress of Marriage à la Mode_ with its few; and the _Progress

of Cruelty_ with its fewest of all--only four, but more than enough! And

yet the stages in the progress of the rake and of the harlot and of

marriage à la mode and of cruelty are infinite; and at no single stage

in the progress of any one of them could you actually find either Rake

or Harlot or Infidelity or Cruelty. Being portrayed as few, the world

understands and finds its own account in them.

So around the walls of his library there hung a series of pictures

showing the progress of Medicine across the ages.

The first picture represented a scene in the life of primitive man,

during the period when he had long enough been man to form into hostile

tribes, but not long enough to have advanced far from the boundaries of

the brute. It is a battle picture: the battle is over: the survivors are

gone: the dead and wounded lie about. Medicine as a human science has

not yet been born; surgery has not yet separated itself from the

movements of instinct. Yet there was activity among the wounded. In some

of the warriors you saw such attempts in the care of their wounds as one

may witness to-day in wounded birds and animals--if one is fortunate

enough to be so placed as to be able to watch: there were the

instinctive devices to cleanse, to protect, to alleviate: those low

beginnings of the great science which you may observe to-day in your dog

when he has come home after a fight with lacerated ears and slashed

thighs--when he crawls under the porch to the darkest corner to keep

away other dogs and light and flies; whose sole instrument of cleansing

is his tongue and whose only bathing fluid is saliva. On that

battle-field you saw such beginnings of surgery as to-day is practised

by a bird treating its broken wing or broken leg. Thus the wounded

warriors concerned themselves with their hurts--all mother-naked. Along

one edge of the battle-field was a stream of running water; some had

started to draw themselves toward this and had died on the way. One was

stretched full alongside--a young chief of magnificent proportions and a

face of higher intelligence. And out of that intelligence, as a

marvellous advance in the development of man, you saw one action: he was

dipping up water in the palm of his hand and pouring it upon his wound.

At some moment in the history of the race there must somewhere have been

that first movement of the developing animal to substitute water for

saliva. That great historic moment was depicted there. It was still the

Azoic Age of Medicine.

Near by hung a second picture. Ages have passed, no one knows how many.

The brute has become Prometheus; he has learned the use of fire; and he

has learned the most heroic application of flame--to touch it to himself

where he is in greatest agony: that is, he has learned to cauterize his

wounds. More than fire can he now handle; he has learned to bring

together fat and flame; and he has discovered how from flame to produce

oil; and he has learned to pour boiling oil into the holes in his body

made by the implements of war. It is the long Ages of Medicine for the

cautery and burning oil.

A third picture hung next. More ages have passed, no one knows how many;

and the scene is another battle-field far down toward modern times. It

is France; it is the second half of the sixteenth century; it is warfare

in Piedmont. Troops are sweeping up the hill, and in the background is a

walled city with turrets and towers; and in the foreground wounded

soldiers are arriving or are lying about on the ground. There is a rude

mass of masonry used as an operating-table; and on the operating-table

is a soldier, one of whose legs has just been amputated above the knee;

an attendant holds the saw with which the leg has just been sawed off,

and the stump of it has dropped below. Beside the wounded man stand two

figures: one the figure of the past; and the other a figure of the

future--a poor barber's apprentice, father of modern surgery, named to

be massacred on St. Bartholomew's eve, but spared because none but a

despised Huguenot could be found in all France skilful enough to

safeguard the royal orthodox blood. There beside the soldier they stand,

these two, and in them ages meet; for the figure of the past holds in

his hand one of the cauteries that are kept redhot in a brazier near his

feet; and the other holds in his a new thing in the world--a simple

ligature. A great scene, a great epoch: the beginning of new surgery

when the flowing of blood from amputations of the great arteries could

be stopped by a mere bandage: that man--Ambroise Paré!

More centuries have passed--we know exactly how many now from year to

year. It is the nineteenth, and it is the New World; the next picture on

the library wall portrayed a scene on the Western frontier of a new

civilization. It is the backwoods of Kentucky, it is a pioneer

settlement of three or four hundred souls, nearly a thousand miles from

any hospital or dissecting-room. In the front door of his rude pioneer

house stands a Kentucky country doctor, Ephraim MacDowell. His patient

is before him, a woman on horseback in a side-saddle. She has just

arrived, having ridden some seventy miles through the wilderness. He is

assisting her to alight; and he is soon to perform, without

consultation, without precedent in the ages of surgery (but not without

a prayer for himself and her), by strength of his own will and nerve and

by the light of the solitary candle of his own genius, an operation

which made Kentucky the mother of ovarian surgery for all coming time, a

new epoch of life and mercy: he going his own way to immortality as

Shakespeare went his, as the greatest always go theirs--by a new path

untrumpeted and alone.

Another picture represented a scene in Boston in 1846, less than half a

century later; for the lonely mountain peaks of progress stretching

across the ages are beginning to crowd each other now; they are

beginning to run together into a range of continuous discovery. That

picture also shows an operating-room; and there stood the American

Morton, making for the world the first merciful use of anæsthetics: with

which the silence of painlessness fell upon humanity's old outcry of

torture under treatment.

There the doctor's pictures ended. In our own time he might have added

one more for the epoch of the Roentgen Ray and another for the Finsen

Light; and another for transfusion of blood; and still others crowning

other mountain-tops in the new Surgery and new Medicine.

Thus he had before his eyes in his library some few Ages of his

Science--as it went forward and slipped back and missed the road and

forgot the road, yet somehow steadily advanced across the centuries like

an erring unconquerable man across his years. Not progressing however as

a man grows, from infancy to decrepitude; but moving from its old age

toward its youth, always toward its youth, as Swedenborg's Angels fly

forever toward their Spring. It ran around his walls like a great

roadway, connecting the last discoveries of his Science with the surgery

of the wolf who gnaws off his imprisoned leg and with the medicine of

the sick dog that eats grass.

He called it his World's Path of Lessening Pain.

It was the last refuge and solace of his often tired and often wounded

mind. Even after friends were gone at night and the poker chips were

stacked or the whist counters folded; after the sideboard had been

visited and temperately forsaken; after the abiding books had done for

him what they could; in the still house far into the night, he would

sometimes lie back in his chair and survey those battle-pictures of a

science on which he was spending his loyalty and his strength.

Once, in younger days, outside the Eternal City, he had gone to study

those fragments of the Old Roman Aqueduct that to-day are slowly

crumbling on the Campagna; and standing alone before it he had in

imagination searched for the figure of some young workman who had helped

to mould those brick or to finish those columns: the figure of some

obscure vanished peasant. So the great wall of his science, being built

onward across the centuries into the future, would be revisited by men

of the future in places where it stood in ruins. He would be as one

whose life with its mistakes was yet linked to indestructible good. He

would vanish from beside the wall himself, but his work upon it would

have helped to uphold humanity. And many a night he went asleep in his

chair, committing himself to his Science, as the forgotten Roman laborer

of old may have fallen asleep under his own arch.

But, in that same Italy, northward are the Apennines; and sometimes in

travelling through these or through the Swiss glaciers where Nature

measures all things on the scale of the sublime--sometimes as your eye

is passing from snow peak to snow peak, suddenly away up on some

mountain-side you will see a human hut; and standing in the door of that

hut a single human being; and the thought may come to you that there, in

the heart of that pygmy, may dwell sorrow that dwarfs the Alps.

The doctor's library had such a picture: it completed the story of the

room, and it effaced everything else in it. In a somewhat darkened

corner hung a framed photograph of his wife in her bridal dress made not

long after their wedding. Once his photograph had hung beside it. The

plaster where the nail had been driven in had either fallen out or it

had been torn out. He never knew--he knew enough not to ask.

As for the photograph, there stood a young bride, looking into her

future and trying to conceal from herself what she saw soon awaiting

her: the life of a woman wedded but not loved. And there was

recollection in the eyes too: that the man who had married her perhaps

in the very breath of his wooing had wished she were another; that at

the altar he had perhaps wished he were putting his ring upon another's

hand; and that if there were to be children, he would always be wishing

for them another mother.

* * * * *

The doctor sat there that morning trying to work at the books of the

year. The rooms were comfortable; the children were away at the fireside

of another man's wife; the servants did not dare disturb him; his horses

waited in their stalls; it was the day on which he could begin to reap

his golden harvest--a pleasant day for most men; but he could not see

the blanks before him nor remember the names he filled in nor the

figures that were for value received.

Because there lay open before him the Book of the Years.

And coming down toward him on the track of memory through this book was

his life from boyhood to middle age: first the playing feet of the child

that have no path as yet; then the straight path of the boy; then the

winding road of youth; then the quickly widened road, so smooth, so

easy, of a young man; and then the fixed deepening rut of middle age.

And now the rut of middle age had come to its forks: north fork and

south fork; or east fork and west fork--he must choose.

Whoso cares to know where and how the doctor's life-path started and

across what kind of country it had run until now, a middle-aged man, he

sat there this day at the tragedy of its forking, may if he so choose

follow the road by the chart of a narrative.

But let him remember that this narrative goes back into a society unlike

that of to-day and into a Kentucky that has vanished. Back there are

other manners, other customs, other types of men: a different light on

the world altogether.

IV

THE BOOK OF THE YEARS

MORE than half a century ago, or during the decade of 1850 and 1860,

when American life on the fertile plain of Kentucky attained its ripest

flavor, there was living with great ease to himself and others on a

large estate in one of the bluegrass counties a country gentleman and

farmer who was nothing more: nothing more because that was enough. Being

farmer took up much of his time, and being a gentleman took up the rest.

He one day observed that his prolific heels were beginning to be trodden

upon by a group of stalwart sons nearing manhood; or, in the idiom of

that picturesque soil, all thickly bunched in their race for the grand

stand. According to the robust family life of that era and people, a

year or less was often the interval between births; and a father,

slanting his eyes upward to his oldest who had just reached twenty-one,

might catch a glimpse of a fourth son smiling loyally at him from the

top of the rank stalk of eighteen.

This juvenescent and prodigal sire clearly foreseeing, as many of his

neighbors foresaw, the emancipation of the negroes and the downfall of

the Southern feudal system and thus the downfall of the Kentucky

gentleman of the feudal soil, could see no further. When those grapes

then ripening went into the winepress of destiny, there would be no more

like them: the stock would be cut down, a new vineyard would have to be

planted; and what might become of his sons as laborers in that vineyard

he knew not, though looking wistfully forth. Therefore he determined to

store them away for their own safeguard among those ancestral

professions alike of the Old and New World that are exempt from

political vicissitude and dynastic changes.

Now it happened that among his friends he counted the great Dr. Benjamin

Dudley, the illustrious Kentucky lithotomist at Lexington; and taking

counsel of that learned and kindly man, he chose for his first-born

stalwart--since the stalwart when invited to do so declined to choose it

for himself--the profession of medicine; and having politely packed his

trunk, he politely packed him with a polite body servant and a polite

good-by off to a medical school, the best the Southern States then

boasted--and the Southern States knew how to boast in those days.

But the colt that has been dragged to the water cannot be forced to

drink; and the semi-docile son could not be made to introduce into his

system his father's professional prescription. His presence at the

medical school was evidence in its way that he had swallowed the

prescription; but his conduct as a student showed that by his own will

he had inhibited its action upon his vital parts.

In the year of finishing his course of lectures his father died; and

upon returning home certificated as a doctor, he returned also as a

young blood of independent fortune, independent future, and independent

Feelings--the last of which, the Feelings, he regarded as by far the

most important of the three. At the bottom of his trunk against the

lining was his diploma, on the principle that we pack first what we

shall need last.

The immediate use this golden youth made of his liberty and his

Feelings was to take over into his control a share of the ancestral

estate that fell to him under our American laws of partible

inheritance; to build on it a low rambling manor house; and into this

to convey his portion of the polished family silver and the polished

family blacks. Soon afterward with no exertion on his part he married

him a wife in the neighborhood; tore up his diploma as if to

annihilate in his establishment the very recognition of disease; laid

off a training-track; and proceeded to employ his languid energies in

a fashion which his father had not favored for any of his sons--the

breeding of Kentucky thoroughbreds.

Years passed. History came and went its thundering way, leaving the

nation like a forest blasted with lightning and drenched with rain. The

Kentucky gentleman of the feudal sort was gone, having disappeared in

the clouds of that history which had swept him from the landscape.

The mild young Kentucky breeder mellowed to his middle years, winning

and losing on the road as we all must, but with never a word about it

one way or the other from him; early losing his wife and winning the

makeshifts of widowerhood, entering so to speak upon its restrictions;

losing his little daughter and winning a nephew whom he adopted and

idolized; letting him run wild over the house, and then about the yard,

and then about the farm, and then across boundary fences into other

farms, and then into the towns, and then out into the world.

There were parts of his farm that looked like English downs; and on

these fed Southdown sheep; for the Kentucky country gentleman of that

period killed his own mutton. (He killed pretty much his own everything,

even his own neighbors.) No saddle of mutton out of a public market

house for him and for his groaning mahogany. And so it seemed well-nigh

a romantic coincidence that the fatherless, motherless boy who came to

play on these downs should have arrived there with the name of Downs

Birney.

The Kentucky turfman, with his Southdown sheep and Durham cattle and

White Berkshire hogs and thoroughbred horses and Blue-dorking chickens,

was born, as may already have been observed, with that Southern

indolence which occasionally equals the Oriental's; and as more time

passed he settled into the deeper imperturbability of men who commit

their destiny to fast horses. Apparently they early become so inoculated

with hazard as to end in being immune to all excitement. As he could

stroll over his farm without having to climb a hill, he had perhaps

preferred to build him a low manor house so that he could lounge over it

without having to take the trouble to go upstairs. In the chosen

business of his life it would appear that he had wished to avail himself

of a principle of Old Roman law: that he who does a thing through

another does it himself; and thus he could sit perfectly still on his

veranda with two legs and run nearly a mile a minute on a track with

four.

A rural Kentucky gentleman of dead-ripe local pre-bellum flavor:

exhaling a kind of Falernian bouquet as he dwelt under the serene blue

sky on a beautiful bluegrass Sabine farm: a warm-visaged, soft-handed,

bland-voiced man--so bland that when he strolled up to you and accosted

you, you were uncertain whether he was going to offer to bet with you or

to baptize you. Season after season this tranquil happy Kentuckian dwelt

there, intent upon making nothing of himself and upon making the horse

an adequate citizen of a state that likes to go its own gait--and to

make him a leading citizen of the world: measurably he succeeded in

doing both.

As he receded from view, his horses advanced into notice. He was

probably never better satisfied with his stable lot and with his human

lot than when at one of his annual sales he could hear the

auctioneer--that high-gingered Pindar of the black walnut stump--arouse

the enthusiasm of the buyers by announcing that a certain three-year-old

had as its sire the _Immortal Cunctator_ and that its dam was the

peerless _Swift Perdition_. Year after year he dwelt there, contented in

drinking the limestone water of his hillside spring with his foals and

his fillies; drinking at his table the unskimmed milk of his Durham

dairy; and drinking indoors and outdoors the waterproof beverage of a

four-seasons philosophic decanter. The decanter resembled the limestone

spring in this at least: that it could never rise higher than being full

and could never be baled dry.

In the vernal season, as sole proprietor of all this teeming rural

bliss, he sat on the top rail of a fence and witnessed the manufacture

of the hippic generations; in summer sat on the top rail of another

fence and saw his colts trained; in autumn in the judges' stand sat with

a finger on his watch and saw them win; in winter, passing into a state

of partial hibernation over the study of pedigrees, his fingers plunged

deep in his beard, with comfortable mumblings and fumblings that bore

their analogy to a bear's brumal licking of its paws.

A veritable Roman poet Horace of a man, with yearlings as his odes--and

with a few mules for satires.

Surely possessed of some excellent Epicurean philosophy of his own in

that he could live so long in a wretched world and escape all

wretchedness. If storms broke over his head, he insisted that the

weather just then was especially fine; if trouble knocked at the door,

he announced with regret from the inside that the door was locked. Is

there any wonder that, nobody though he insisted upon being, his

appearance in public always attracted a crowd? For the inhabitants of

this world are always looking for one happy inhabitant. His

acquaintances hurried to him as they would break into a playful run for

a barrel of lemonade at a woodland picnic when they needed to be cooled;

or as they waited around a kettle of burgroo at a barbecue in autumn

when they wished to be warmed. Hot or cold, they felt their need to be

sprayed as to their unquiet passions by his streaming benevolence.

Always that benevolence. On two distinct occasions he had placidly

reduced by one the entire meritorious population of central Kentucky;

and then with a clear countenance, had presented himself at the bar of

justice to be cleared. Upon his technical acquittal, the judge had

casually said that no matter how guilty he was, it would have been a

much fouler crime to hang a citizen with so innocent an expression; that

the habitual look of innocence was of more value in a homicidal

community than a verdict of guilty for two fits of distemper!

If the world should last until Kentucky passes out of history into the

classic and the mythological; if Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road

should become Orion and the Milky Way; if the capture of Betsy Calloway

should become the rape of Lucrece; if the two gigantic Indian fighters,

the Poe brothers, should establish their claim to the authorship of

those Poems and Tales which even in our own time are beginning to fall

away from a mythical personage,--hardly more than an emanation of

darkness, perhaps this unique Kentucky gentleman who insisted upon being

no one at all will exhibit his beaming face in the heavens of those ages

as Charioteer to the Horses of the Sun.

The sole warrant for here disturbing his light repose under his

patchwork of turf is that he had taken to his hearthstone and heart an

orphan nephew, whose destiny it was to be profoundly influenced by the

environment of heart and hearthstone: by this breeding of horses, by the

method of training them; by that serene outlook upon the world and that

gayety of nature which attracted happiness to it as naturally as the

martin box in the yard drew the martins. Possibly even more influenced

in the earlier years around that fireside where there was no women, no

mother, no father, either; nor parent out of doors save the motherhood

of the near earth and the fatherhood of the distant sky.

From the day when he arrived on that stock farm its influences began

their work upon him and kept it up during years when he was not aware.

But in his own memory the first event in the long series of events--the

first scene of all the scenes that made his Progress--occurred when he

was about fifteen years old. As the middle-aged man, sitting in his

library that morning with the Book of the Years before him, reviewed his

life, his memory went straight back to that event and stopped there as

though it were the beginning. Of course it was not the beginning; of

course he could not himself have known where the beginning was or what

it was; but he did what we all do as we look back toward childhood and

try to open a road as far as memory will reach,--we begin somewhere, and

the doctor began with his fifteenth year--as the first scene of his

Progress. But let that scene be painted not as the doctor saw it: more

nearly as it was: he was too young to know all that it contained.

It was a balmy Saturday afternoon of early summer; and uncle and nephew

were out in the yard of the white and lemon-colored manor house,

enjoying the shade of some blossoming locust trees. The uncle was

sitting in a yellow cane-bottom chair; and he had on a yellow nankeen

waistcoat and trousers; so that the chair looked like an overgrown

architectural harmony attached to his dorsal raiment; and he had on a

pleated bosom shirt which had been polished by his negro laundress with

iron and paraffine until it looked like a cake of winter ice marked off

to be cut in slices. In the top button-hole was a cluster diamond pin

which represented almost a star-system; and about his throat was tied a

magenta cravat: that was the day for solferinos and magentas and Madeira

wine. But the neck of the wearer of the cravat was itself turning to a

gouty magenta; so that the ribbon, while appropriately selected, was as

a color-sign superfluous. On the grass beside him lay his black alpaca

coat and panama hat and gold-headed cane and red silk handkerchief and a

piece of dry wood admirable for whittling.

He had been to a colt show that morning several miles across the country

in a neighborhood where there was some turbulence; not the turbulence of

the colts; and he had reached home just before dinner--glad to get there

without turbulence; and the dinner had been good, and now he was

experiencing that comfortable expansion of girth which turns even a

pessimist toward optimism; that streaming benevolence of his countenance

never streamed to better advantage.

He was reading his Saturday weekly newspaper, an entire page of which

showed that this was a great thoroughbred breeding-region of the world.

At the distance of several yards you could have inferred as much by the

character of the advertisements, each of which was headed by the little

black wood-cut of a stallion. The page was blackened by this wood-cut as

it repeated itself up and down, column after column. Whether the

stallion were sorrel or roan or bay or chestnut or black--one wood-cut

stood for all. There was one other wood-cut for jacks--all jacks.

In the same way one little wood-cut in an earlier generation had been

used to stand for runaway slaves: a negro with a stick swung across his

shoulder and with a bundle dangling from the stick down his fugitive

back; one wood-cut for all slaves. If you saw between the legs of the

figure, it was a man; if you did not--it was the other figure of man's

fate in slavery.

The turfman read every item of his newspaper, having first with a due

sense of proportion cast his eye on the advertisement of his own stud.

The nephew was lying on the grass near by, wearing a kind of

dove-colored suit; so that from a distance he might have been taken for

a huge mound of vegetable mould; he having just awakened from a nap: a

heavy, rank, insolent, human cub with his powers half pent up and half

unfolded, except a fully developed insolence toward all things and

people except his uncle, himself, and his friend, Fred Ousley. He rolled

drowsily about on the soft turf, waiting to take his turn at the

newspaper: it was the only thing he read: otherwise he was too busy

reading the things of life on the farm. Once he stretched himself on his

back, looking upward for anything and everything in sight. The light

breeze swung the boughs of the locust, now heavily draped with blossoms;

and soon his eyes began to follow what looked like a flame darting in

and out amid the snowy cascades of bloom--a flame that was vocal and

that dropped down upon his ear crimson petals of song--the Baltimore

oriole.

He liked all birds but three; and presently one of those that he

disliked appeared in a fork of a locust and darted at the oriole,

driving it away and then returning to the fork--the blue-jay. His hatred

of this bird dated from the time when one of the negroes had told him

that no blue-jays could be seen at twelve o'clock on Friday--all having

gone to carry brimstone to the lower regions. After that he and Fred

Ousley had made a point of trying to kill jays early Friday morning: a

fatally shied stone would cut off to a dead certainty just so much of

that supply of brimstone. He hated them even more on Saturday, when he

thought of them as having returned. The one in the fork now was looking

down at him, and, with a great mockery of bowing, called out his

_Fiddle-Fiddle-Fiddle_: it was his way of saying: "You'll get there: and

there will be brimstone, sonny!"

Of course he believed none of this legend; but suggestions live on in

the mind even though they do not root themselves in faith; and memory

also has its power to make us like and dislike. Presently, as he lay

there stretched on the grass and near the edge of the shade, another

ill-omened bird came sailing cloud-high across the blue firmament; and

having taken notice of him,--a motionless form on the earth below,--it

turned back and began to circle about him. That was another bird he

hated. When a child he asked about it, and had been told that it removed

all disagreeable things from the farms. He thought it a very kind, very

self-sacrificing and industrious bird to do so. And he conceived the

whole species of them as a procession of wheelbarrows operated across

the sky by means of wings and tails. Afterwards, when his views grew

less hazy on natural history, he lowered his opinion of the

disinterested buzzard.

The third bird on which had fallen his resentment was the rain-crow:

earlier in his childhood it had been told him that when the clacking

wail of this songster was heard on the stillness of a summer day, a

storm was coming. And he had seen storms enough on that very

farm--tornadoes that cut a path through the woods as a reaper cuts his

way across the wheat-field. But he saw no rain-crow to-day; you look for

them in August when they haunt the cool shade-trees of lawns.

Altogether these three birds made with one another a rather formidable

combination for a boy living on a farm: the one brought on storms that

threatened life; the second gladly presided at your obsequies, if the

opportunity were given; and the third was pleased to accompany you to

the infernal regions with the necessary fuel. The arrangement seemed

about perfect; apparently they had overlooked nothing of value.

Thus he had not escaped that vast romance of Nature which brooded more

thickly over Kentucky country life in those days than now: a romance of

superstitions and legends about bird life and animal life and tree life,

that extended even to Nature's chemicals; for was there not brimstone

with its story? As far back as he could remember he had been made

familiar with the idea--rather terrible in its way--that there was a

variety of Biblical horse which breathed brimstone. All alone one day he

had made a somewhat cautious personal examination of the paddocks and

stalls; and was relieved to discover that his uncle's horses breathed

out only what they breathed in--Kentucky air. He felt glad that they

were not of the breed of those Biblical chargers.

But then there was brimstone in reserve for a large portion of the human

family; and with a perverse mocking deviltry he pushed his inquiry in

this direction still farther. Without the knowledge of any one he had

wasted at a drugstore in town his brightest dime for a package of the

avenging substance; and at home the following day he had scraped chips

together at the woodpile and started a blaze and poured the brimstone

in. Actually he had a sample of hell fire in operation there behind the

woodpile! There was no question that brimstone knew how to burn: it

seemed well adapted for its purpose. He did not take Fred Ousley into

his confidence in this experiment: the possibilities were a little too

personal even for friendship!

All this reveals a trait in him which lay deeper than child's-play--a

susceptibility to suggestion. Even while he amused himself as a child

with the shams and superstitions about nature, these lived on in his

mind as part of its furnishings. Alas, that this should be true for all

of us--that we cannot forget the things we do not believe in. To the end

of our lives our thoughts have to move amid the obstructions and rubbish

of the useless and the laughable. The salon of our inner dwelling is

largely filled with old furniture which we decline to sit in, but are

obliged to look at, and are powerless to remove; and which fills the

favorite recesses where we should like to arrange the new.

There they were, then, that Saturday afternoon: the uncle with his

newspaper and the nephew at that moment with his group of evil birds.

There was an interruption. Around the yard with its velvet turf and

blooming shrubs and vines and flowers, that filled the air with

fragrance, was a plank fence newly whitewashed. All the fences of the

farm had been newly whitewashed; and they ran hither and thither across

the emerald of the landscape like structures of white marble. Through

the gate of the yard fence which was heard to shut behind him there now

advanced toward uncle and nephew a neighbor of theirs, the minister of

the country church, himself a bluegrass farmer. He was one of the many

who liked to seek the company of the untroubled turfman. The two were

good neighbors and great friends. The minister came oftenest for a visit

on Saturday afternoons, as if he wished to touch at this harbor of a

quiet life while passing from the earthly fields of the week to the

Sabbath's holy land.

At the sound of the latch the uncle lifted his eyes from his newspaper.

"Bring a chair, Downs, will you?" he said in a cordial undertone; and

soon there was a fine group of rural humanity under the blossoming

locusts: the two men talking, and the boy, now that his turn had come at

last, lying on the grass absorbed in the newspaper.

The men were characters of broad plain speech, much like English squires

of two centuries earlier: not ladylike men: Chaucer might have been

pleased to make one of their group and listen, and turn them afterwards

into fine old English tales; Hogarth might have craved the privilege to

sit near and observe and paint; and a certain Sir John Falstaff might

have been at home with them--in the absence of the "Merry Wives."

There was another interruption. Around the corner of the manor house a

young servant advanced, bearing a waiter with two deep glasses well

filled: at the bottom the drink was golden; it was green and snow-white

at the top: a little view of icebergs with pine trees growing on them.

The servant smiled and approached with embarrassment, having discovered

a guest; and in a lowered tone she offered to the master of the house

apologies for not bringing three.

"This is yours, Aleck," said the host, holding out one glass to the

minister. "This is for you, Downs. Now, Melissa, make me one, will you?"

"None for me," said the minister.

"Then never mind, Melissa. But wait--lemonade?"

"Yes; lemonade. It is the very thing."

"As it is or as it might be?"

"As it is."

"Lemonade without the decanter, Melissa."

While the servant was in the house, the uncle and the nephew waited with

their glasses untouched.

The turfman was very happy--happy in his guest, in his nephew, in

himself, in everything: his mind overflowed with his quaint playfulness;

and when he talked, you were loath to interrupt him.

"Aleck," he said, rattling the ice in his julep, "don't you suppose that

when we get to heaven, nothing will make us happier there than

remembering the good times we had in this world? so if you want to be

happy there, be happy here. _This_ is one of the pleasures that I expect

to carry in memory if I am ever transformed into a male seraph. But I

may not have to remember. If there is any provision made for the thirst

of the Kentucky redeemed, do you know what I think will be the reward of

all central Kentucky male angels? From under the great white throne

there will trickle an ice-cold stream of this, ready-made--and I

shouldn't wonder if there were a Kentuckian under the throne making it.

The Kentucky delegation would be camped somewhere near, though there

will be two delegations, of course, because they will divide on

politics. And don't you fear that there will not be others hastening to

the banks of that stream! It is too late to look for young Moses in the

bulrushes; but I shouldn't wonder if the whole ransomed universe

discovered old Moses in the mint."

"_Which mint?_" said the minister, who kept his worldly wits about him.

"Aleck," replied the turfman, "I leave it to you whether that is not too

flippant a remark with which to close a gentleman's solemn discourse."

The lemonade was served.

"Is yours sour enough, Aleck?"

The visitor found it to his taste.

"Is yours sweet enough, Downs?"

This hurt Downs' feelings: it implied that he was not old enough to like

things sour. He replied surlily that his might have been stronger.

The servant, watching from inside a window, judged by the angle at which

the glasses were tilted that they were empty: she returned and asked

whether she should bring 'one more all around.'

"More lemonade, Aleck?"

"Thank you, no more for me--but it was good, better than yours."

"Another for you, Downs?"

Downs thought that he would not have another just for the moment: the

servant disappeared.

The nephew returned to his paper. The turfman took from the turf a piece

of whittling wood, split it, and handed the larger piece to the

minister. The minister produced his penknife and began to whittle. In

those days a countryman who did not carry his penknife with a big blade

well sharpened for whittling as he talked with his neighbor stood

outside the manners and customs of a simple cheerful land. And now the

two friends were ready to enjoy their afternoon--the vicar of souls and

the vicar of the stables.

The minister began to speak of his troubles--with that strange leaning

we all have to let our confidences fall upon people who are not too

good: the vicar of the stables was not too good to be sympathetic. It

was all summed up in one sentence--discouragement about his growing

boys. From the beginnings of their lives he had tried to teach them the

things they were not to do; and all their lives they had seemed bent on

doing those things. He felt disheartened as the boys grew older and

their waywardness increased. _What not to do_--morning and night _what

not to do_. Yet they were always doing it.

Out under the trees the peaceful happy sounds of summer life in the yard

came to the ears of the minister as nature's chorus of happiness and

indifference. The breeder of thoroughbreds, as his friend grew silent,

laughed with his peaceful nature, and remarked with respect and

gentleness:--

"I never train my colts in that way."

"My sons are not colts," said the minister, laughing. "Nor young

jackasses!"

"Yes, I know they are not colts; but I doubt whether their difference

makes any difference in the training of the two species of animal."

After a pause which was filled with little sounds made by the

industrious penknives, the master of the stables went into the matter

for the pleasure of it:--

"You tell me that you have tried a method of training and that it is a

failure. I don't wonder: any training would be a failure that made it

the chief business in life of any creature--human or brute--to fix its

mind upon what it is _not_ to do. You say you are always warning your

boys; that you fill their minds with cautions; that you arouse their

imagination with pictures of forbidden things; make them look at life as

a check, a halter, a blind bridle. So far as I can discover, you have

prepared a list of the evil traits of humanity and required your boys to

memorize these: and then you tell them to beware. Is that it?"

"That is exactly it."

The youth lying on the grass laid aside his newspaper and began to

listen. The two men welcomed his attention. The minister always found it

difficult to speak without a congregation--part of which must be

sinners: here was an occasion for outdoor preaching. The turfman

probably welcomed this chance to get before the youth in an indirect way

certain suggestions which he relied upon for his:--

"Well, that is where your training and my training differ," he resumed.

"I never assemble my colts at the barn door--that is, I would not if I

could--and recite to them the vicious traits of the wild horse and

require them to memorize those traits and think about them unceasingly,

but never to imitate them. Speaking of jacks, Aleck, you know our

neighbor stands a jack. And he would not if he could compel his jack to

make a study of the peculiarities of Balaam's ass. But you compel your

boys to make a study of Balaam and his tribes. You teach them the

failings of mankind as they revealed themselves in an age of primitive

transgression. I say I never try to train a horse that way. On the

contrary I try to let all the ancestral memories slumber, and I take all

the ancestral powers and develop them for modern uses. Why, listen. We

know that a horse's teeth were once useful as a weapon to bite its

enemies. Now I try to give it the notion that its teeth are only useful

in feeding. You know that its hoofs were used to strike its enemies: it

stood on its forefeet and kicked in the rear; it stood on its hind feet

and pawed in front. You know that the horse is timid, it is born timid,

dies timid; but had it not been timid, it would have been exterminated:

its speed was one of its means of survival: if it could not conquer, it

had to flee and the sentinel of its safety was its fear; it was the most

valuable trait it had; this ancestral trait has not yet been outlived;

don't despise the horse for it. But now I try to teach a horse that feet

and legs and speed are to serve another instinct--the instinct to win in

the new maddened courage of the race-course. And I never allow the horse

to believe that it has such a thing as an enemy. He is not to fear life,

but to trust life. I teach him that man is not his old hereditary enemy,

but his friend--and his master. I would not suggest to a horse any of

its latent bad traits. I never prohibit its doing anything. I never try

to teach it what not to do, but only what to do. And so I have good

colts, and you have--but excuse me!"

The minister stood up and brushed the shavings from his lap and legs;

then as he took his seat he covered his side of the discussion with one

breath:--

"I hold to the old teaching--good from the foundation of the world--that

the old must tell the young what not to do."

"Aleck," replied the vicar of the stables with his quaint sunniness,

"don't you know that no human being can teach any living thing--man or

beast or bird or fish or flea--_not_ to do a thing? you can only teach

_to do_. If there is a God of this universe, He is a God of doing. You

can no more teach 'a not' than you can teach 'a nothing.' Now try to

teach one of your sons nothing! This world has never taught, and will

never teach, a prohibition, because a prohibition is a nothing; it has

never taught anything but the will and desire to do: that is the root of

the matter. Do you suppose I try to keep one of my cows from kicking

over the bucket of milk by tying her hind legs? I go to the other end of

the beast and do something for her brain so that when she feels the

instinct to kick which is her right, what I have taught her will compel

her to waive her right and to keep her feet on the ground. That is all

there is of it."

They were hearty and good-humored in their talk, and the minister did

not budge: but the boy listened only to his uncle.

"Do you remember, Aleck, when you and I were in the school over yonder

and one morning old Bowles issued a new order that none of us boys was

to ask for a drink between little recess and big recess? Now none of us

drank at that hour; but the day after the order was issued, every boy

wanted a drink, and demanded a drink, and got a drink. It was thirst for

principle. Every boy knew it was his right to drink whenever he was

thirsty--and even when he was not thirsty; and he disobeyed orders to

assert that right. And if old Bowles had not lowered his authority

before that advancing right, there would not have been any old Bowles.

There is one thing greater than any man's authority, and that is any

man's right. Isn't that the United States? Wasn't that Kentucky country

school-house the United States? And don't you know, Aleck, that as soon

as a thing is forbidden, human nature investigates the command to see

whether it puts forth an infringement of its liberties? Don't you

_know_, Aleck, that the disobedience of children may be one of their

natural rights?"

At this point the uncle turned unexpectedly toward his nephew:--

"Does this bore you, Downs?"

Downs remarked pointedly that half of it bored him: he made it perfectly

clear which was the objectionable half.

The uncle did not notice the discourtesy to his guest, but continued his

amiable observation:--

"To me it all leads up to this--and now the road turns away from colts

to the road you and I walk in as men. It leads up to this: the

difference between failure and transgression. Command to do; and the

worst result can only be failure. Command not to do; and the worst

result is transgression. Now we all live on partial failure: it is the

beginning of effort and the incentive to effort. We try and fail; with

more will and strength and experience we wipe out the failure and stand

beyond it. Long afterwards men look back and laugh at their failures,

love them because they are the measure of what they were and of what

they have become. It is our life, the glory of more strength, the

triumph of will and determination. It is the crowning victory of the

world. And it is the road that leads upward.

"But transgression! No transgression ever develops life; it is so much

death. You can't wrest victory out of transgression: it's a thing by

itself--a final defeat. And what has been defeated is your last

safeguard--your will. Every transgression helps to kill the will. It

weakens, discourages, humiliates, stings, poisons. The road of

transgression is downward."

He stood up, and his guest with him. As he lifted his alpaca coat from

the grass and put it on, there was left lying his bowie-knife, and he

put that on. It was the bowie-knife age.

"Will you come with us, Downs?"

Downs thought he would now read the newspaper.

"Where is Fred Ousley?" asked the minister of him, knowing that the two

boys were inseparable.

"He has gone to a picnic."

"Why didn't you go to the picnic?"

"I wasn't invited: it's his cousins'."

"And haven't you any cousins who give picnics?"

"I don't like my cousins: I hate my cousins: Fred hates _his_ cousins:

it's a girl that goes _with_ his cousins."

"And what about a girl with your cousins?"

"Well, while you're talking, what about your sons and their cousins?

We're running this farm very well, and we're all pleased. From what I

have been hearing, it's more than can be said about yours."

The minister laughed good-naturedly at this rudeness as the two friends

walked away; but the vicar of the stables observed mildly:--

"You gave him the wrong kind of suggestion, Aleck. It wasn't in your

words exactly; I don't know where it was; but I felt it and he felt it:

somehow you challenged him to employ his manly art of self-defence; and

part of that art is to attack. But never mind about Downs. Now come to

the stable: I am going to show you a young thoroughbred there that has

never had a disagreeable suggestion made to him: he thinks this farm

paradise. And the five great things I tried to teach him are: to develop

his will, to develop his speed, to develop his endurance and

perseverance, to develop his pride, and to develop his affection: he is

a masterpiece."

* * * * *

In the green yard that summer afternoon, under the white locust blossoms

and with the fragrance of rose and honeysuckle and lilac all about him,

the youth lay on the grass beside the newspaper--which he forgot. A new

world of thinking had been disclosed to him. And he made one special

discovery: that as far as memory could reach his uncle had never told

him not to do anything: always it had been to do--never not to do.

And he was a good deal impressed with the difference between failure and

transgression. He did not at all like that idea of transgression; but he

thought he should like to try failure for a while; then he could call on

more strength, tighten his will, develop more fighting power. He rather

welcomed that combat with failure which would end in success.

He wished Fred were there. It was Saturday he came to stay all night;

and the two were getting old enough to talk about their futures and at

what ages each would marry. They described the desirable type of woman;

and sometimes exchanged descriptions.

And then suddenly he rolled over the grass convulsed with laughter:

his uncle was raising him as a thoroughbred colt. He approved of

the training, but somehow he did not feel complimented by the

classification. Fred would have to hear that--that he was being trained

as for a race-course.

* * * * *

The next morning he was sitting in church; and the minister read the

Commandments.

Hitherto he had always listened to them as the whole congregation

apparently listened: as to a noise from the pulpit that drew near,

lasted for a while, and then rumbled on--without being meant for any

one. But this morning he scrutinized each Commandment with new

thoughtfulness--and with a new resentfulness also; and when a certain

one was reached he made a discovery that it applied to men only: "Thou

shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife."

Why should not wives be commanded not to covet their neighbors'

husbands? he wondered. Why was the other half of the Commandment

suppressed? Moses must have been a very polite man! Perhaps there was

more involved than courtesy: otherwise he might have found life more

tolerable among the Egyptians: he might have been forced to make the

return trip across the Red Sea when the waters were inconveniently deep.

Those Jewesses of the Wandering might have seen to it that he was not to

have the pleasure of dying so mysteriously on Nebo's lonely mountain:

his sepulchre would have been marked--and well marked.

He sat there in the corner of the church, and plied his insolent satire.

Fred Ousley must hear about the second discovery also--the Commandment

for men only.

* * * * *

Then three years passed and he was eighteen; and from fifteen to

eighteen is a long time in youth's life; things are much worse or things

are much better.

It was one rainy September night after supper, and he and his uncle were

sitting on opposite sides of the deep fireplace.

Some logs blazed comfortably, and awoke in both man and youth the

thoughtfulness which lays such a silence upon us with the kindling of

the earliest Autumn fires. Talk between them was never forced. It came,

it went: they were at perfect ease with one another in their

comradeship. The man's long thoughts went backward; the youth's long

thoughts went forward. The man was smoking, at intervals serenely

drawing his amber-hued meerschaum from under his thick mustache. The

youth was not smoking--he was waiting to be a man. Once his uncle had

remarked: "Tobacco is for men if they wish tobacco, and for pioneer old

ladies if they must have their pipes. Begin to smoke after you are a

man, Downs. Cigars for boys are as bad as cigars would be for old

ladies."

The way in which this had been put rather captured the youth's fancy: he

was determined to have every inward and outward sign of being a man: now

he was waiting for the cigar.

He had been hunting with Fred Ousley that afternoon, and just before

dark had come in with a good bag of birds. A drizzle of rain had

overtaken him in the fields and dampened his clothing. The truth is that

he and Ousley had lingered over their good-by; Fred was off for college.

Supper was over when he reached the house, and he had merely washed his

hands and gone in to supper as he was, eating alone; and now as he sat

gazing into the fire, his boots and his hunting-trousers and his dark

blue flannel shirt began to steam. He was too much a youth to mind wet

garments.

The man on the opposite side sent secret glances across at him: they

were full of pride, of a man's idolatry of a scion of his own blood. He

was thinking of the blood of that family--blood never to be forced or

hurried: death rather than being commanded: rage at being ordered:

mingled of Scotch and Irish and Anglo-Saxon--with the Kentucky wildness

and insolence added. Blood that often wallowed in the old mires of

humanity; then later in life by a process of unfolding began to set its

course toward the virtues of the world and ultimately stood where it

filled lower men with awe.

September was the month for the opening of schools and colleges. The

boy's education had been difficult and desultory. First he had gone to

the neighborhood school, then to a boys' select school, then to a

military school, then to a college. Usually he quit and came home. Once

he had joined his uncle in another State at the Autumn meeting of a

racing association--had merely walked up to him on the grounds, eating

purple grapes out of a paper bag and with his linen trousers pockets

bulging with ripe peaches.

"Well, Downs," his uncle observed by way of greeting him, as though he

had reappeared round a corner.

"Who won the last race?" inquired the boy as though he had been absent

ten minutes.

Now out of the silence of the rainy September night and out of the

thoughtfulness of the fire, the imperious splendid dark glowing young

animal steaming in his boots and flannel suddenly looked across and

spoke:--

"If I am ever going to do anything, it is about time I began."

The philosopher on the other side of the fire grew wary; he had given

the blood time, and now the blood was mounting to the brain.

"It is time, if you think it is time."

"One thing I am not going to do," said the arbiter of his fate, as if he

were drawing a surprise from the depths of his nature and were offering

it to his uncle; if possible, without discourtesy, but certainly without

discussion--"one thing I am not going to do; I am not going to breed

horses."

The fire crackled, and no other sound disturbed the stillness.