A Life Unveiled, by a Child of the Drumlins

by Anonymous

CHAPTER VIII The “Medic”

Belle and I decided to go to a coeducational school to study medicine, and settled upon Boston University. I was a happy girl that summer, getting ready and picturing the future. Associating Boston with Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, and Whittier, I loved it before going there. Belle, who had studied guide-books and maps, was glib in her knowledge of the city; she knew just where the railway station was, and the college, and how to get from one to the other. Her confidence impressed me, for maps and topography were ever a vexation to my spirit; her assurance impressed our parents also, and it was decided to let us make the journey alone.

Our family physician, who had written to the Dean, had received an assuring letter: we were to go directly to the College and matriculate, and there obtain addresses for boarding-places. In later years I have realized what misgivings our parents must have had in letting us start out alone, mere schoolgirls who had never been more than thirty miles from home, green village girls, unused to city ways—ignorant of the world, of life, of themselves.

The last picture I have of my grandfather, is the one as he rode into our door-yard the October afternoon of the evening I was to start for Boston. Sitting his horse firmly and proudly (he was then eighty-five) he brought me a fine full ear of yellow corn for a “keepsake.” I have often wondered what made him bring that particular thing. Was it that he knew the sight of it when far from home would be so dear, serving to bring back Grandma’s kitchen and the overhanging ears suspended by their turned-back husks? Or was it that he recollected what a fascination the full golden ears had had for me when I had played around the corn-house years before in the October weather? I never knew. I think I did not then question why. But that long yellow ear of corn which he brought to me on the eve of my first leaving home was a precious gift, inexplicably precious as I try to explain it now. I clung to him with unwonted tenderness as I bade him good-bye, and through my tears watched him slowly ride away.

The night we left home, just before I started for the train, my class-mate, Walter, came to the door and asked for me. I wondered why he had not gone ahead to the station with the other young people. Drawing me out on the “stoop”, in the darkness he quickly kissed me, wrung my hand, and with a choked “good-bye” ran down the steps. Astounded as I was, and with my strict ideas about such things, still I did not resent that kiss. And as Father and I drove to the station in the darkness, leaving Mother alone at home, to weep, I was sure (though she had kept up till the good-byes were over) Walter’s kiss was a welcome diversion, a partial relief to the pang of leaving home and parting with Mother.

At the station the young people were gathered, chatting gaily, but Sister was unusually quiet. They loaded us down with fruit and flowers and absurd advice—a merry noisy party as the train came thundering in; merry and noisy except for the few who were pale and silent with something wretchedly painful tugging at our hearts and rising in our throats.

Hurried kisses and hearty handclasps to the girls and boys, and then—my sister! We had not thought it would be so hard. It was like tearing one’s body apart. Never till that moment had we realized what we were to each other. We had never been separated more than a week in our lives, and here was this train ready to bear me away from home, away from my precious sister, into a life in which she was to have no part! The agony as they separated us (for we clung in desperation as the men shouted “All aboard!”) was the most cruel thing that had then come into my life.

When at Syracuse, after putting us on the sleeper, Father left us, another pang was added; the last link was snapped. I can see him now trying to look cheerful as he waved to us from the platform; and I trying to keep the tears back till the train should bear us from his sight. Never a word of all the anxiety and misgiving he and Mother must have felt! The train moved off bearing the two girls with aching throats and tear-stained faces—two girls who had never left the home shelter, bearing them rapidly away in the darkness to the unknown city to begin the study of medicine.

Soon reacting from the sadness of parting, after the lumps had left our throats, we became excited, even gay. Everyone had advised us what to do on a sleeper; had warned us about thieves; told us of queer amusing things which happened to inexperienced travellers, and we were fairly spoiling for an adventure of some sort. But as our fellow-passengers seemed strangely indifferent to us, we began to feel it was going to be quite uneventful. Still, though detecting no one who looked like a thief or a cut-throat, we hid our purses and watches with care, and I kept my hat-pin within easy reach, in case any one should molest us. We found some difficulty in fastening the curtains of our bed; there were great gaps between the fastenings; men passing down the narrow aisles would drag the curtains aside. It was a novel and not at all reassuring experience—we girls cooped up on that narrow bed, undressing in the dark stuffy place, right in the sound of men’s voices, with men continually passing. It seemed then, and to this day it seems, a kind of indelicate thing to disrobe in the proximity of a carful of strange men, with only insecure draperies to insure privacy.

In our apprehension and unsophistication, we thought this continued brushing aside of our curtains must be done intentionally. Not then realizing how narrow the aisles were, or that it was not the same person going by repeatedly, we grew angry: “If I hear him coming again I shall grab the curtains together and hold them, so he can’t brush them aside,” I said resolutely to Belle. The steps soon came again, the curtains began moving. I made a desperate grab to hold them together, but, oh horrors! what happened!

“What’s wanted?” I heard in calm, clear, gentlemanly tones, and then learned that I had also grabbed the coat of a passer-by!

Chagrined, I stammered, “I—I—thought——,” and suddenly realizing my mistake, felt the impossibility of explaining my awkward blunder—the man had doubtless inadvertently brushed past, as had the others, in the narrow aisle. His innocent coat-tail released, he passed on. Wondering in shame what he must have thought of us, we suddenly awakened to the realization that no one was inclined to molest us; that our school fellows had been telling us “yarns”; and we had better lie down and try to sleep. So, using the hat-pin to fasten the refractory draperies, we lay down to sleep, though fitfully, the long night through.

As we breakfasted from our lunch-boxes in the morning, we felt years older; how long it seemed since we had left the little village amid the drumlins! We were in a new world. It was raining when we reached Boston, which did not add to our light-heartedness.

How queer to see so many strange faces; everyone so busy, so intent upon his own concerns, oblivious to the forlorn girls transplanted to the strange city—everyone but the horrid, importunate cab-drivers who leaned out from their stalls, and beckoned and called to us, bewildering us so that we were a long time in settling upon one who looked less villainous than the rest. We drove directly to the College to matriculate. The unwonted scenes, the poor sleep, the irregular meals, and the rain, all contributed to our gloom; but the Dean’s letters—we had a friend at court!

How forlorn we must have looked, and pitiably young and inexperienced for such an undertaking! The janitor eyed us curiously, and to our request to see the Dean said he was not there then, but that Dr. Caroline Matson was the one to call for—“She sees the new students.”

She came into the room. Shall I ever forget the chill and depression she brought with her? A short, stout, middle-aged woman with light brown hair, a turned-up nose, a pink and white complexion, spectacles, and penetrating steel-blue eyes. She looked us up and down and through and through. I never felt so utterly small and insignificant. I think she said “Humph!” when, in desperation at her scrutiny, I faltered, “We’ve come to study medicine.” I tried to add that we wanted to see the Dean; that he had written us; was expecting us; but she interrupted me. The Dean was not to be seen then; we were to register, fill out certain blanks, answer the questions, and then write an essay of a given number of words setting forth our reasons for studying medicine, if we had any; or write on any topic we chose. Then she left us.

Glancing furtively at each other, we each read the dismay that neither dared express. I think we felt her ears were as sharp as her eyes and that she would hear the lightest whisper. We almost feared she could hear our thoughts. For an hour or more we wrote on the questions and the essay. Then she came and told us we were to meet others of the Faculty to be examined orally in Latin translation, physics, and chemistry. What a blow! Coming from New York state where the all-powerful Regents reigned, we had supposed that our Regents’ certificates and our academic diplomas would exempt us from all examinations.

“We don’t have to be examined,” we ejaculated in unison.

“You don’t? Are you college graduates?” (Sarcastically)

“No, but we have our Regents’ Certificates and pass-cards.”

“Regents’ certificates?—what are they?”

Had the bottom fallen out of everything? The Regents, THE REGENTS—that tyrant for which we had toiled so long, whose coveted seal we had on our precious diplomas! And she doesn’t even know what the Regents is!

We learned several lessons that bitter hour. Our explanations, though lame, must have been intelligible, for, moderating a little, she explained that they had no such system in Massachusetts, and that it would be necessary to qualify in certain studies since we were not graduates of a college; but that as we were so recently out of school (and this seemed reprehensible on our part), we would probably have no difficulty. Then she examined our papers. Those cold eyes passed rapidly up and down; once in a while she would look up, sometimes ask a question, then read on. She could not have been conscious of the torture she inflicted, or she would surely have been easier on those sleepy, hungry, homesick girls, so completely at her mercy. Now as I dimly recall what my essay was, I wonder that her sarcasm and harshness were so moderate. I remember I quoted from “Lucile” about the mission of woman being “to help and to heal the sick world that leans on her.” She grunted when she put my paper down, and I breathed freer. Then, taking up Belle’s, she gave an angry snort—something had acted like a red rag to a bull:

“Minnie Isabel Washburn! Is that your name?”

“Ye-es, ma’am,” Belle timidly confessed.

“Were you christened that?” (Glaring at her)

“I wasn’t christened, I was baptized,” Belle corrected boldly, the Baptist in her rampant—her religion was something for which she could show courage even in this encounter.

“Well, it won’t be tolerated here. When will mothers learn to give their children sensible names? Doctor Minnie Washburn! How will that sound?” and she almost annihilated us in scorn. Belle was speechless, Belle the assured one, to whom I had looked for leadership and help in all these new experiences; Belle of the boasted self-confidence, of the undaunted courage! It was a strange sight to see her cowed, but that woman’s face and voice were enough to intimidate any one. Without thinking, surprised and scared at my own voice, but goaded to it by the pain she was inflicting, I ventured:

“I don’t suppose Belle’s mother knew she was going to be a doctor when she gave her that name.”

My! how she turned and glared at me! Our eyes were about on a level. I don’t know whether I flinched or not; I have a recollection of a superhuman effort to glare back, but dare say I weakened. I remember her look seemed to say:

“You little upstart! who asked you to speak?” Then she announced:

“Well, it can’t go down ‘Minnie’—that’s settled. You will have to drop that and just keep the ‘Isabel.’”

“But I can’t drop it (Belle was almost crying)—it was my grandmother’s name; I’ll have to write home and ask my father first.”

“No time for that—the way you register to-day, that way your diploma has to read. We will have to see the Dean about this; but you may as well understand we will have no ‘i-e’ names here; we graduate women, not babies. I’ll see the Dean.”

Out she went. Belle and I looked at each other hopelessly. “If that is what women doctors are like, I don’t want to be one,” each of us thought, and knew the other’s thought.

Disheartened, disillusioned, tired, sleepy, hungry, far from home, our Regents’ certificates counting for nothing, this great unfriendly building, the dull sky, and we not knowing where we were going to stay that night—all this and more we felt as we looked at each other and tried to keep back the tears.

And then SHE came back and told us to go across the hall to the Dean.

We saw the sign “Faculty Room,” and went in. Rising to greet us, coming with both hands extended, his ruddy face and smiling eyes beaming a welcome, a short, stout, gray-haired man waddled toward us, enveloping us in his benevolent presence. It was a wonder we did not throw ourselves into his arms. Taking us by the hand he beamed and we basked in the sunshine of his fatherly welcome. Many a time in the years that have passed I have wished I could tell him what he was to us girls that day. I think I did essay it once, three years later, when I came to see much of him. I have always loved him for that welcome. He is gone now. A remarkable man, overflowing with energy and tact, a champion of Homœopathy in its early days in Boston—the University, in fact, Homœopathy in general owes more to him, probably, than to any other man in New England. We came in time to hear him criticized by certain students; sometimes heard it said that he carried his politic measures to the point of insincerity; but I never had the slightest reason for changing the feelings toward him which were born that day. Though subsequently seeing some of his limitations, I admired his exceptional gifts—his indomitable energy, and his wonderful executive ability, while his warmheartedness won my lasting regard. I did change my opinion of Dr. Caroline Matson, but of that later.

How tactfully the Dean went to work to soothe Belle, and yet bring about the proper registering of a name that would be dignified and in good taste as a physician!

“‘Minnie’—let us see—that is your first name? I suppose you are fond of it, but it doesn’t sound just right for a physician, does it?”

Under his kindly glance Belle explained that she had never used that name, that she had always been called “Isabel” or “Belle,” but that as the paper asked for her full name, she had given it.

“Quite right, quite right; well now, if that is not the name you are accustomed to, why not drop it? Anyhow, your name is a long one, ‘Isabel Washburn,’ what a fine-sounding name! ‘Dr. Isabel Washburn’—I like that.”

“So do I,” said Belle, getting confidential, “but I can’t drop ‘Minnie,’ because it is my grandmother’s name; my father, I’m sure, would object.”

This gave him pause, but he was equal to the occasion:

“Of course, of course you can’t drop your grandmother’s name-ah, but-ah—why, it is all as clear as can be now—‘Minnie’ is only the nickname for ‘Mary’—your grandmother’s name was Mary, even if they called her familiarly ‘Minnie’; and all you need to do is to use your grandmother’s real name instead of her nickname.” And he beamed on her benevolently.

Belle hesitated, but his charm of manner won the day. The alteration was made, the obnoxious “Minnie” gave place to “Mary,” and we were smilingly turned over to other members of the Faculty, who questioned us on chemistry and botany, in which, I believe, we did fairly well. We read the easy Latin at sight, conjugated a few verbs (I remember how they tried to conceal their smiles at our faulty pronunciation—we knew it was faulty, for we had shifted from the Roman to the English method, and our hybrid pronunciation was enough to excite mirth). When it came to physics, always a difficult study for me, we floundered and failed ignominiously. I’m sure I did the worse, for Belle could reason out such things pretty well, while I never could. We were “conditioned” in physics, and in a month’s time were to be examined again. Although they were very kind, we felt disgraced. Realizing that we had failed in one study, and probably had been leniently passed in others, we felt ourselves the ignorant, homeless creatures that we were. They told us to come the next day at ten for the opening lecture.

Copying several addresses from the bulletin board, we trudged out of the big building, with our satchels and lunch-boxes in our hands. A fine rain was falling; it seemed later in the day than it was. We were adrift in that great city. Deciding to look up none of the addresses till the morrow, we started for the Young Women’s Christian Association, of which we had heard before leaving home. Belle thought that when we got out to Washington Street she could get her bearings and easily find Warrenton Street, where the Association building was. But on reaching there, she could not be sure whether to go up or down; so we plodded on, not knowing whether we were going toward or away from our hoped-for destination. Everyone we accosted was kind, but no one knew where Warrenton Street was. Car after car would go by, but we did not know what one to take. The only policemen we could discover were on the cars. We laughed miserably as we thought of our parents’ injunctions to “ask a policeman.” The Boston policemen didn’t like walking in the rain.

On and on we trudged, our arms aching from the satchels, and, much of the way, harrowed by uncertainty. Finally someone told us we were nearing the street in which the Y. W. C. A. was located. How good it was to spy that sign, and how like a shelter the huge building was as it loomed before us! The street was narrow and dismal (it was even on a sunshiny day) and on that dark day looked especially unpromising, but our goal was reached; our strength and courage were well-nigh spent. Shelter, refuge—what meaning in those words, and how soon we had learned the need of them in this big, strange, rainy Boston!

The girl who answered the door-bell, a slow-moving, stolid creature, replying to our request to see the Superintendent, said that she was at dinner; that we would have to wait. It was then after two in the afternoon. Of course we would wait; we asked for nothing better. We volunteered that we had come to engage room and board.

“I’m sorry, but the house is full,” she said.

Belle dropped into a chair. She had gone through so much! Her vaunted courage was proving a broken reed. I stood there, desperate, not knowing which way to turn. On the way thither it had gradually dawned upon me that Belle’s courage was rapidly oozing. I had had to exchange satchels with her and carry her heavier one (though she was taller and larger than I), as she had declared she could carry it no farther. It was a novel position for me—to be the leader; but we tacitly changed places during that long rainy walk.

I looked at Belle, a forlorn heap in the chair. I saw that stolid girl, waiting for us to go, since she had told us there was no room—to go out in the rain, no shelter in view! I felt the humiliation of our position before the girl who was showing impatience for us to start, but summoned enough spunk to say, “Please tell the Superintendent we would like to see her when she is at liberty.”

Leaving us with the parting shot that “Every room in the house is taken,” she went away.

Bursting into tears, Belle declared she would go home on the morrow; she didn’t want to study medicine—had never wanted to—only did it to please her people—didn’t like Boston—hated Dr. Matson, and didn’t want to be a woman doctor any way; she would go back and teach school. Her outburst astonished me. Pitying her, and agreeing with her in part, her giving way put me on my mettle. So, having sense enough to know that we were both worn from the physical and emotional strain, and that, dark as things were, they seemed darker because of our exhaustion, I sat down and, opening our lunch-box, fairly forced the food into Belle’s mouth, and devoured some myself. The messenger girl passed the door several times, peering in curiously; she looked as though she were going to tell us we must not eat in the waiting room, but passed on. It must have been an unaccustomed sight to her. I myself felt the unfitness of it all, but did not care; we were nearly famished; it was the desperation of self-preservation.

As we ate and talked, Belle drooped less, and we soon got interested in the coming and going past the door. Happy, laughing girls passed and re-passed, running to catch the elevator, peeping in at us with half-veiled curiosity, and moving on. How envious we felt at seeing them greet one another—everybody knew everybody else in Boston, except these two miserable girls who knew only each other.

We kept looking at the clock; we tried to jest, wondering what that woman had for dinner that kept her so long. We must have sat there an hour, expectant, anxious. The messenger girl seemed to have disappeared for good. At last, desperate, I started out down the strange corridor, and there met her:

“Hasn’t the Superintendent finished her dinner yet?” I queried.

“Oh, my, yes, an hour ago—I forgot to tell her you were waiting.”

I must have looked my wrath, for she went off in short order, returning soon with a tall, stern, handsome woman, the Superintendent’s assistant. This lady heard our tale calmly, looked at us critically, and told us the house was full; she was sorry, but she would give us addresses of boarding-places near by. Belle declared she could not stir another step to look for a place. At this vehemence the calm lady lifted her eyebrows, but said nothing. I must have said in my most supplicating tones, “Can’t you make room for us some way, just for to-night—we are so tired,” for she deliberated, then said, “We will go and see what Miss Dillingham has to suggest.” And she ushered us up to the office of the Superintendent.

Dark and gloomy every corner of that building had seemed that rainy afternoon, but as the door opened, a cheerful fire, and an atmosphere of warmth and ease and home enveloped us. Sitting at a desk was a stout, red-cheeked, red-nosed woman with bright gray eyes. She looked up, nodding a greeting to us, and listened to her assistant’s explanations.

“I’ve told them I don’t see how we can accommodate them,” the younger woman said, not unkindly but dispassionately. I remember admiring her stately grace as she moved about the room, but feeling from the way she closed her lips that we had little to hope from her.

“Why have you come to Boston?” queried the Superintendent as she rose and came toward us.

“We came to study medicine,” I said, and tried to explain further, when my voice gave way, and I lost the self-control I had been maintaining all day against such odds. I turned to Belle and she took up the tale, but broke down, too. Then the good soul gathered us both in her arms, held us close to her broad bosom and let us sob out the grief that refused to be suppressed any longer.

Then, conferring with her assistant, after some directions about changes, she rang for the bell-girl and told her to have room 60 prepared for us at once; they would manage to keep us that night, and to-morrow would help us find a boarding-place. She then told us the supper hour, and the time for evening prayers, and, advising us to get a nap, said we would feel like new creatures by evening.

The clean little room with its two narrow beds and scanty furniture—what a haven it was! Exploring our surroundings, and removing the dust of travel, we lay ourselves down in our little white beds and quickly fell into a sound if not untroubled sleep. We must have slept several hours. The first thing I was aware of was the singing of a hymn in a distant part of the building. It was dark. I wondered where I was. Low sobs from the other side of the room brought me to my senses. The singing made me homesick, my throat ached, my own tears started, and creeping out of bed I went over to Belle, and there we sobbed away in our misery, while those young voices on the floor above sang:

“Jesus, Saviour, pilot me

Over Life’s tempestuous sea;

Unknown waves before me roll,

Hiding rock and treacherous shoal.

Wondrous Sovereign of the sea,

Jesus, Saviour, pilot me.”

Our cry out, we felt better. Belle experimented with the gas, finally succeeding in lighting it. (It was a week or more before I felt safe in doing it—I disliked that sudden noise just as it ignited, it made me jump; and I always felt doubtful whether I had turned it off, too, and had to call Belle to come and see if it was leaking.)

As the supper hour was long past, we ate the remnants of our lunch, looked out on the strange street with the hurrying passers-by, explored the bath-room, and, after much investigation about the fixtures, took our first baths in a bath-tub, and went to bed for the night, in almost a cheerful frame of mind. We talked long in the darkness, getting better acquainted than we had in all the years of school together. Never especially congenial, as children contending together for the supremacy of the things we espoused—Republicanism and Methodism versus Democracy and the Baptist faith—over these in former years we had waged war; but there in the darkness we discussed earnestly and amicably our individual faiths (or doubts, now, in my case), our hopes, our ideals, coming to a better understanding than ever before.

In the morning the sun shone gloriously. In the great dining room a hundred or more girls were seated. No doubt we showed by our awkwardness that it was our first venture into city life; but we had a grip on ourselves, and felt equal to the day’s experiences; they couldn’t possibly be worse than yesterday’s and, I felt exultantly, we had lived through them. As she left the dining room the Superintendent nodded kindly to us, later sending for us to come to the office. There she told us they would manage to keep us a week, or until a room could be secured for us at the branch Association on Berkeley Street, a newer and better building, and much nearer the College. This was indeed good news, and we started off for College with almost pleasurable anticipations-so bright was the sun, so crisp the October air, and so eager were we to see what was in store for us.

I remember well those first walks to and from the College; our perceptions alert, everything so different from what we were accustomed to; the ordinary street scenes, the ways of the people, the peculiar pronunciation of the passers-by, even of the newsboys—everything was food for wonder, amusement, or ridicule to the two village girls: Why didn’t they build their side-walks on a level, instead of making the pedestrian step down at every crossing, and then up again? Gradually we learned that these marked the ends of blocks. We did not like the houses built all together, they looked queer and dismal. We marvelled at the huge dray-horses, and laughed at the queer herdics tumbling along; we puzzled over the street cries; we looked with interest at the “Tech” boys as we passed them on their way to the Institute of Technology, and felt a community of interest with them, as well as with the Conservatory students, as, crossing a little park, we saw them file into the New England Conservatory of Music. On nearing the College we saw the medical students coming briskly from all directions, nearly all of them carrying what seemed to be part and parcel of their equipment—the ubiquitous brown-leather Boston bag.

A thrill of expectancy went through me as, turning into Concord Street, we felt ourselves a part of this life. The building looked quite familiar on seeing it for the second time, and despite our disheartening experiences of the previous day, I went up the steps eagerly, in half-suppressed excitement.

It was some days before Belle ceased her threats of going home, and she was always more or less of a malcontent. I am sorry to say we were not very harmonious roommates, though we never openly quarrelled. If I received higher marks than she did in our trial “exams,” she usually made herself and me wretched; if I met with special cordiality and friendliness, her ill-natured comments often took the savour out of what would have been pleasant experiences for me. I frequently found myself guiltily trying to conceal things of which I would ordinarily have been frankly glad, just to save a scene. There’s no denying that she was inordinately jealous, and it was a temperament I had never come in contact with before. Though seldom airing our differences, there was, with me, I know, a good deal of unexpressed irritation. Sometimes I would go in the clothes-press and shake my fist at her wrapper, a garment which seemed peculiarly to personify her. This relieved me a little.

New as it all was, I felt at home in Boston at the start, and was disposed to like everything. Happy and interested in my work, I also revelled in the good general library at the Y. W. C. A., in the churches, the lectures, the Art Museum, the symphony concerts, the quaint old parts of Boston, the Common, the Public Gardens—it was all life, and more abundant than I had dreamed would be mine. And people liked me. One of my weaknesses in later years—this liking so to be liked—then it was merely an innocent pleasure to feel, as I usually instinctively felt, that I was generally liked.

As a class we were on friendly terms; the ages ranged from girls in their ’teens to women of perhaps thirty-five; the men were mostly in the twenties; a few were older. Two of the young men were always talking to Belle, between lectures, against women studying medicine. She would rehearse their arguments to me, especially toward the close of the year, telling how they laboured with her to give up medicine; that it unsexed women; that they didn’t care a rap about most of the women in the class, but hated to see “nice girls” like her and me keep on with the course, and at last turn out like Dr. Matson and some of the masculine senior girls.

I thought then, and still think, that there is nothing in the study or practice of medicine that need make a woman less womanly. It ought rather to make her more so. By reason of being a woman she may lack some qualities that go to make the ideal physician, but, if so, this limits her as a physician; it need not detract from her qualities as a woman. But few women, and by no means all men, physicians, possess the mechanical skill and other qualities that make a good surgeon; but the general practice of medicine, I think, is not beyond the mastery of many a woman’s mind and strength. If a capable woman, with a well-trained mind, and with self-mastery, engages in the study and practice of medicine and fails, it is, I believe, rather because stronger interests attract her than because she cannot master it. And as for masculinity as seen in women physicians, those same women, as I used to point out to Belle, were masculine before they began to study medicine—would have been so in any walk in life. We occasionally saw Dr. Anna Shaw around the College—she had graduated there some years before—distinctly the masculine type. Many of the women of the faculty were charmingly feminine; and, better still, some that were not so charming were strong and womanly, and commanded the respect of their confrères, both as women and as physicians.

It was months before either Belle or I ceased to shudder when we saw those steely eyes of “Dr. Caroline” fastened upon us. As she was professor in anatomy, we saw much of her the first year. Her lectures were thorough, painstaking, and interesting. But, though excellent as an instructor, she scared the life out of us at quizzes. She would call each student by name, then pause—time for every eye to fasten upon one—then a searching look into one’s eyes, and the question was fired. I never answered satisfactorily, even when I knew well the answer, she disconcerted me so, making me tremble to the very marrow of my bones—those bones she knew so well! She had a system of marking at quizzes, giving each student a plus mark for correct answers, ten of which would count one on his final examination. The boys called her “Our Caddie.” We even got so that we did ourselves. The incongruity of the “i-e” name, applied to HER, particularly pleased Belle and me. But we learned to respect her, as did all the students. It was rumoured that she never treated any student with geniality till he had passed her chair in anatomy; it was also rumoured that it was one of the hardest things to pass that chair. Occasionally we caught sight of her friendly manner to some of the upper-class students, and fairly revelled in her rare smiles when we saw them bestowed on some lucky senior. She was transformed when she smiled. And in spite of her mannish stride, and her abrupt, brusque ways, she had certain womanly traits which we rejoiced to see: she blushed exquisitely, and had pretty dimpled hands with pink finger tips—I used to note them when she passed the trays with the anatomical specimens, and her dainty way of using the towel after handling them. I have said that she was a middle-aged woman, but I wonder if she was not younger than that: in those days I regarded every one past the twenties as middle-aged, or old.

“Dr. Caroline” instructed us that first year, in microscopy, too, and was very exacting. I had no special aptitude for it, and was afraid of making blunders. She was so deft, and I so awkward in preparing specimens, often breaking the fragile cover-glasses and spoiling my bits of tissue which she doled out to us as precious morsels. How the smell of the oil of cloves which we used in the work brings up those sessions in microscopy—the students seated at the long tables “teasing” their specimens with the fine needles, and mounting and labelling the minute scraps of tissue!

We had private quizz-classes among ourselves: Four of us girls met for study in the evening—I say girls, the two others were no longer girls; one was probably twenty-five, the other perhaps near thirty. The younger of these, Miss Thorndike, was also from the Empire State, a bright, capable person, used to city life, a striking, winning personality, and one who had herself well in hand. She had some masculine ways which she tried rigorously to overcome. She seemed to know the ropes of college life pretty well; she was sophisticated, and we were not and, realizing our inexperience, she exercised a chaperonage over us so tactful that we were not aware of it till years after. Miss Wilkins was a typical strenuous New England woman, prim and sensitive, who constituted herself our avowed chaperone, directing, scolding, and mothering us; making peace between us, and dictating to us when we much preferred to paddle our own canoes. Though fond of her, we often teased her, sometimes deliberately doing things to shock her (how easily she blushed!); yet we always ended penitently with, “but Miss Wilkins is such a good woman!” And she was, and withal very human and tolerant of our uncurbed, undisciplined ways. I realize now how much we owe to hers and Miss Thorndike’s kind and wise supervision.

We rented bones to study the first year. I recall the amused feeling I had the night I carried home my box of bones: Crossing the park, as I met passers-by, I thought, “Wouldn’t they open their eyes if they knew what is in this box!” Here, as always, the incongruity, the hidden reality, appealed to me.

One day at the Y. W. C. A., when it was too cold to study in my room, taking Gray’s Anatomy and my rented femur, I went out and sat by the radiator at our end of the hall; there was but little passing to and fro and I was soon absorbed in reading Gray and tracing the various facets and foramina on the huge thigh-bone.

“Young woman, is that a human bone?” a voice called to me severely from the other end of the long hall.

“Yes, would you like to see it?” I answered—how innocently, I cannot say. I am under the impression that even at the start I recognized her horror, and did it mischievously, but with an air of innocence as I held it toward her.

“You horrid thing!” she gasped and disappeared in her room. This disconcerted me: She was the head-laundress of the institution, and she and the Superintendent were great friends. I well knew she was angry, but I was a bit angry, too. I didn’t like being called names, and had high ideas of the respectability of my pursuit; I knew it was neither horrid nor disgraceful to study anatomy, whatever she in her prim, prudish way might think. Getting more and more angry, I could study no longer.

That night, dear, sensitive Miss Wilkins came to me in perturbation: I had offended Miss Tyler; she might complain of me to the Superintendent. I got on my highest heels of dignity: Miss Tyler had offended me; I was sitting in my end of the hall attending to my own affairs when she accosted me; and when I politely answered her, even offering to show her what I was interested in, and about which she seemed so curious, she had insulted me, rudely called me names, and slammed her door, and the episode had spoiled my afternoon’s study; and did not Miss Wilkins herself think that the cause for complaint was on my side?

Then it was that Miss Wilkins laboured with me. At first I was obdurate, and even in the end did not quite agree with her; but so persuasive was she, that I promised not to study my bones in the hall again, and not to offend Miss Tyler, or any one else, by what was to them unquestionably an offensive sight. She reminded me that we must not expect everyone to look upon these things from the scientific standpoint; that we must respect the prejudices of others; that we surely did not want to make ourselves conspicuous or obnoxious, and bring reproach upon women medical students. She struck the right note there, knowing how I recoiled from Dr. Matson’s mannish ways, and that I had said I would rather not be a doctor at all, if I had to get coarse and masculine. As she showed how timid and conservative Miss Tyler was, she made me feel it my duty to refrain from further wounding her sensibilities.

How we observed, and insensibly estimated, our various instructors! Our professor in physiology was a diffident, scholarly man, stiff as a poker; dry and ponderous as a lecturer. We liked the chemistry professor, and liked the laboratory work, yet chemistry was for me the hardest first-year study. Nowadays when I see certain chemicals that we used in experiments, I get a sudden vision of my desk in the laboratory, with the test-tubes, the gas-burners, the retorts, the filter-papers, and all; and can even see the faces of the various students as they stand at their desks heating solutions; holding others up to the light—now one bends to record something on a chart, now there’s a crash of broken glass, a rustle and a stir, perhaps a giggle, as some unlucky student blunders in an experiment. How it all comes back at the sight of a bottle marked Cupric Sulphate, or H₂ SO₄! What a witty lecturer we had in the History and Methodology of Medicine—a short, fidgety man with big blue eyes and benevolent face. He had a funny way of pulling at his collars and cuffs while lecturing, as if they choked him and he wished he could take them off.

When early in the first year our courses in dissections began, I was all eagerness—the untried always having its charm for me. My name being at the beginning of the alphabet, it fell to me to be one of the first six students to work on the first subject. I had bought my dissecting-case from one of the “middlers”; my long-sleeved apron was ready; and I awaited impatiently the day, little dreaming what I was so eager about.

Assembled in the dissecting room that first day to see us begin were many middlers and seniors, as well as the sixty or more in our own class. Each “subject,” as the cadavers are called, is apportioned in six “parts,” lots being cast for the “parts,” six students working simultaneously on a body. Half the abdomen and the right lower extremity fell to me. My partner on the other side was a young woman, older than I, but very shy and reserved. Other students drew the head and neck, the chest and upper extremities.

That first day as we entered the dissecting room there lay the body, a man’s body, stiff and stark, on the slanting zinc-covered table. The arteries had been injected with red wax, and much of this loose wax and other extraneous matter was clinging to the skin of our subject. It was horrible to see the naked body. I had not thought of that. I don’t know what I had thought of, surely not that—and this room full of onlooking students!

The Demonstrator in anatomy gave us a serious talk, inciting us to earnestness, cautioning us against carelessness, levity, or other unseemly behaviour, after which he told us to set to work. The first thing, he said, was to sponge the part assigned to us, then make our incisions, as we had been previously instructed, and proceed with the dissections.

I shall never forget the repugnance as well as the embarrassment I felt at beginning our task. The young men in our class, as new as were we to it all, were awed as well as we, but those horrid middlers and seniors looking on with amusement! I felt my face getting redder and redder, and Miss Bigelow’s cheeks looked as though they would burst; but with downcast eyes we kept at work, probably taking far more pains than we needed to. I can see just how gingerly we held the sponges; the wax stuck; we thought we had to get off every speck. Then Miss Bigelow, without looking up, whispered, “What shall we do with the pail?”

“Empty it, I suppose,” I snapped out; and getting up courage enough to glance round the room, spied a sink. Stooping, I picked up the loathsome pail and, with blazing cheeks, started across the room, feeling that a great indignity was being undergone—to have to do this at all was bad enough (I still think it was janitor’s work), but it was intolerable to do it before those idle middlers.

Before I had taken many steps a young man in our class came up, took the pail from me, and in a soothing tone said, “Please let me—now the worst is over, Miss Arnold.” The tears started at his kindness. The other young men must have felt ashamed, for they soon rallied round the table, showing us how to make the first incisions, how to hold our scalpels and tissue forceps, in fact, giving us many useful hints. We had had the theory, but to make the actual incisions, to lift the skin and deftly dissect it from the tissues beneath—was different from what we had imagined.

Going from student to student, the Demonstrator instructed and encouraged each in turn. Soon the room, thinned of its spectators, took on a different aspect: the novices bent over their work with interest and absorption. The painful emotion I had felt at seeing those bodies, stripped and at the mercy of our little knives and forceps, soon gave place to genuine enthusiasm. I dreaded the feel of the cold skin, but once that was removed, I was all interest; one then lost sight of the human side, and saw only the beautiful mechanism. How wonderful it seemed when I had the external abdominal muscle laid bare, and its structure disclosed, and this and the other muscles and their adaptations seen! Some days later when one of the girls, working on an arm, had the deltoid exposed, I was surprised to hear one of the assistant demonstrators (a woman) say to her, “It is a pretty muscle, isn’t it?” “Pretty” seemed such an incongruous word to use, but I soon learned to admire the well-dissected muscles, though rather than “pretty” I should have called them “beautiful.”

The instructors demonstrated the viscera, which, with the muscles and other “soft parts” were removed piecemeal, and disposed of daily. Whitman’s tremendously realistic line, “What is removed drops horribly into the pail,” always takes me back to the dissecting room with its repulsive odours and its sorry sights. But our growing interest did much to mitigate the repellent features.

The actual dissection was interesting and easy for me, but it was not easy to demonstrate the muscles and groups of muscles, for it was always difficult to comprehend their action. Never having been able to understand levers and pulleys and mechanical things, I could not reason out things which were so obvious to others. It was absurd, after getting the muscles nicely dissected, with their points of origin and insertion before my very eyes, to be unable to deduce what their actions were. I had no “gumption.” This inability on my part puzzled the Demonstrator and his assistants—the senior students, who moved about from table to table, listening to our recitations whenever we would get a group of muscles exposed for demonstration. One dignified senior who was usually on hand to hear me recite, was painstaking in trying to make me understand their action: “Why, can’t you see?” he would ask; then, convinced that I could not, would try to drill it into my head. His dignified air awed me considerably, and I was demure and respectful to him, always calling him “Doctor” as, in the freshness of our first-year’s awe of them, we supposed we had to call the seniors. But one day, when in the reading room, I saw him try to kiss one of the senior girls, my awe vanished; after that I was a trifle pert and independent. It was funny how my whole attitude then changed toward him. I suddenly saw through the mock dignity he carried while in the dissecting room. In vain he tried to impress me with his gravity, I only laughed in his face. So we soon got on fairly friendly terms, as much as a humble junior and a “grave and reverend senior” could be. Sometimes I surprised him looking at me with a quizzical, half-amused look that changed to a frown and an attempt at dignity, when he saw I was observing him. I imagine he quite enjoyed the deference of my earlier manner, and was not a little annoyed at the discovery which had disillusioned me.

Some weeks after I had seen him trying to steal that kiss, when I was one day working on the head and face, he came up to hear me demonstrate the facial muscles. The action of the muscles had got to be a kind of joke between us, still he always laid particular stress on that, persisting until I understood, and when practicable usually requiring me to illustrate the action. That day I had been dissecting out the Orbicularis Oris—the round muscle of the mouth. After I had described it and its relations, he asked smilingly, “And the action?” I replied that it was used to pucker the mouth, as in whistling, and—and (mischievously) in kissing—if you can. He blushed furiously, knowing then, positively, that I had, on that occasion, seen the girl slip out of his grasp. Assuming a mock dignity he said, “I have a mind to require you to illustrate the action—it is within my province, you know.” Then I felt cheap, and blushed furiously, too. Later in the afternoon the Demonstrator himself came round and slyly asked if I was ready to demonstrate the action of the Orbicularis Oris yet, so I knew the senior assistant had told him about it.

We had been told that no parts of our subjects might be taken from the dissecting room—a necessary prohibition, as the College pledged itself to bury the skeletons intact. (The boys used to say it was so there would not be so much confusion on Resurrection Morn.) But each year students were intent on purloining a hand or a foot, or some part, as a souvenir. Because forbidden, of course I had this silly ambition, too. (We were on our honour, else it would have been easy.) I bethought me how I could get around the restriction: Our Anatomy said that sesamoid bones were small unimportant bones sometimes found in the tendons, not properly included as a part of the skeleton. The Demonstrator had urged us all to hunt for sesamoid bones, meaning, of course, the small adventitious ones that were a rarity. Herein I saw my chance: One day while working around the knee, as the Demonstrator stood watching me, I asked:

“Doctor S——, have any sesamoid bones been found this year?”

“No, I have heard of none.”

“They are not properly a part of the skeleton, are they?” (Innocently)

“Oh, no, no, they are very unimportant affairs—interesting only as anomalies,” he said pompously.

“Then (demurely) I suppose I may keep all the sesamoid bones I find in my subject, mayn’t I?”

He laughed and said, “Yes, you are welcome to all the sesamoid bones you find,” and started to walk away.

“Thank you, Dr. S——,” I said, with ill-concealed triumph, “I’ll take this patella when I go home to-night.”

He started, coloured, looked annoyed, then amused. He was fairly caught, for the patella, though of course a legitimate part of the skeleton, is formed in the tendon of the Quadriceps Extensor, and is described by Gray, because of its mode of development, as a kind of sesamoid bone—a fact which had somehow stuck in my memory, as unimportant things will, while others of greater import sifted through. The Demonstrator walked away looking a little chagrined, but later I saw him laughing on the sly with the seniors, and before he left he came back and said, “You may take your ‘sesamoid bone’, Miss Arnold; you have earned it.”

I had not thought out how I could contrive to get a souvenir from my next “part,” but this same Demonstrator unwittingly helped me out. I was at work on the wrist, and as he stood looking on he asked, “Have you found any more ‘sesamoid’ bones?” I said No, but just then the little pisiform bone, not much bigger than a pea, stood out so conspicuously that, seeing how easy it would be to sever it from the other small bones, I purposely made a careless cut, and the little thing rolled on the table.

“Oh, my!—well, you surely wouldn’t have me put that mite in the pail—and it won’t stay on the wrist now.”

He knew, and I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew, that I did it purposely—his question, the prominence of the tiny bone with its slender attachment, put it in my head—“Opportunity makes the thief.” So he let me have the pisiform, but shook his head as though he thought me incorrigible; and after that rallied me on what ruse I would resort to with my next “part,” as I could hardly take the head, or any of the vertebræ. I have these bones somewhere now. They gave me a lot of bother to get clean, and of what earthly use are they? Yet perhaps as much as many of the things we scheme and work for. It is the endeavour that counts, and it was fun to outwit the Demonstrator. So we managed to get some amusement out of the dry bones, but were glad when the long weeks were at an end and we could go out in the sunshine after lectures instead of working in that unsightly upper room.

One of the memorable experiences of that first year was an afternoon spent with Laura Bridgman. Helen Keller’s achievements have since familiarized us with what wonders can be done in teaching one who is deaf, dumb, and blind, but when Dr. Samuel G. Howe attempted to teach the child, Laura, it was pioneer work, and the difficulties were well-nigh insuperable.

Miss Wilkins and I were invited to meet Miss Bridgman by Mrs. Lamson, who, under Dr. Howe, had been one of the first to teach Laura to communicate with others by means of the sign language. Mrs. Lamson told us of those early struggles, how overjoyed child and teachers were the day they succeeded in making her understand that certain signs made upon her open hand represented the door-key which they had put in her hand. When the import of this one thing, for which they had toiled long, dawned upon the shut-in soul, she was a freed being; she went about eagerly touching other objects, teasing in her mute way to be shown their “sign,” too. Slow, infinitely wearisome were those first steps in her education, but after a certain point, progress was astonishingly rapid. She had not the distraction other learners have; her thirst for knowledge was intense; her memory phenomenal—a thing once learned became a part of her; she wore out all her teachers with her insatiable desire to learn.

Among other things Dr. Howe earnestly wished to test whether the human mind, without suggestions from outside, would, in its development, evolve the idea of a Supreme Being. Here was an unprecedented opportunity to test it, for, shut in as she was, Laura had no means of learning anything except through her teachers. It would be a valuable contribution to psychology to learn for a surety whether, unaided, her mind would conceive the idea of a Deity. So for years they planned and laboured with this experiment continually in view. Assistants were rigorously instructed to exclude any hints or teachings which would suggest worship or religion—anything which could in the remotest way give her a glimmering of such ideas. Laura was showing wonderful progress in development. Dr. Howe’s efforts seemed on the way to success in this important test, when one of his teachers was called away at a time when he himself was in Europe. The substitute, though carefully enjoined to observe the precautions so jealously practised, actuated by untimely zeal, and believing it to be her duty to thwart Dr. Howe in his experiment, deliberately enlightened Laura about the main orthodox teachings: she told her she had a soul to save from eternal damnation; that a just God stood ready to pardon her manifold sins, and so on. Laboriously she poured into Laura’s listening fingers the intricate orthodox instruction concerning which she had hitherto been kept in blissful ignorance.

One can imagine the difficulties encountered in expounding to this deaf, dumb, blind, and bewildered girl (whose only religious training had been daily examples of loving-kindness), the puzzling doctrines that then passed for religious teaching. But in that, as in all else, Laura was an apt pupil, and on Dr. Howe’s return from Europe he found the careful forethought and labour of years destroyed by that fanatical teacher. He was nearly frantic with rage and disappointment. I myself can never think of that bigoted interference without my own breath coming fast in anger.

When we saw her, Miss Bridgman was a tall, spare woman, perhaps not more than fifty, though she seemed much older to me than fifty seems now. Pale (she wore blue spectacles over the blind eyes); her dark brown hair was parted over a refined face which had a non-fleshly look, very mobile, very sensitive—a quivering, changing face with the soul very near the surface; her lips were thin and very red. Her long white hands were marvellous in their rapidity, receptivity, and expressiveness.

Mrs. Lamson talked to her by swift touches on the palm, Laura’s lightning fingers replying on her friend’s hand—a marvellous sight, those two silently communicating, by touch alone, all the complicated things which the instructor interpreted to us.

The one word which this mute woman could articulate was “doctor.” In youth she had accidentally uttered the syllables and on being told what it sounded like, had eagerly practised until she could articulate the word. Though intelligible, it was distressing to hear it, and I was glad when she resumed talk on her silent uncanny fingers.

“I don’t think it is nice for women to be doctors,” she said, on learning that we were medical students. When her friend told her she ought not to say this, she inquired, “Why not, if I think so?” They had never been able to convince her that politeness sometimes constrains us to conceal our thoughts. She even added, “Tell them I do not think that women can be as skilful as men.” But she soon asked us to prescribe for her eyes, explaining that the lids were sometimes sore. It struck us as novel to be asked to prescribe for Laura Bridgman’s eyes. Her friend told her we were only students, and had not yet learned to prescribe, but added, “I can tell you something that will relieve them—if you will get some of the iron-water from a blacksmith and bathe them, it will help the soreness.”

“What is a blacksmith?” asked Laura—“Is it one who colours things black?”

There she had been all her life learning far more complicated things than this, yet this familiar occupation was unknown to her! It was a pleasure to see her teacher impart to her this information; to see the eager, childlike delight as the knowledge became her own. We saw why this aged face gave the impression of perennial youth; why we thought her then, and still think of her, as a child; she had the freshness and curiosity of a child; every contact with her fellow-beings opened new vistas to her mind; every explanation begat other inquiries; she was tireless in her endeavours to learn. Human strength was not equal to the avidity she continually showed.

As we were leaving she said, “Please ask them if I may touch their faces, then I shall know them when I see them again.”

Those white fingers twinkled over every part of my face—“the moving finger” read, and seemed to read with uncanny skill. I was uneasy, except that it was done so delicately, done eagerly, yet lingeringly. It was as though she were probing my soul to find what manner of being I was. She felt my hair, my shoulders, my hands. I cannot recall now whether she made any comments. Then she did the same with Miss Wilkins, whose ready blush mounted while restively submitting to those searching fingers.

Laura paused and began talking to Mrs. Lamson. The latter laughed, shook her head, replied on Laura’s fingers, seemingly arguing a point.

“What does she say?” insisted Miss Wilkins.

“She says that you are old and, when I told her no, she insisted. I told her you were not old, but were older than your friend, and then she cornered me by saying, ‘Ask her the year she was born.’ She always was obstinate under evasion.”

Miss Wilkins blushed deeper than ever, but enjoyed Laura’s ready wit, though forbearing to satisfy her curiosity as to the tell-tale year.

Though we attended strictly to business, it was not all work in those days; yet we had little time or money for amusement. But in Boston there is much to see and learn at little cost. The churches themselves are an education, and I was an inveterate church-goer, hearing Phillips Brooks the oftenest of any, but Minot Savage frequently, occasionally little old Cyrus Bartol (whom someone called “the moth-eaten angel”), Edward Everett Hale, James Freeman Clarke, Phillip Moxom, George Gordon, and others.

When we had been only about two weeks in Boston a Harvard “medic,” introduced by a Michigan cousin, called upon me. He was a bright, dignified young man. The acquaintance proved pleasant and stimulating throughout the college course. It seemed good to have a caller in the strange city, and one who knew cousin Etta, and we were soon on the best of terms. Suddenly I thought of Belle upstairs alone, and went for her, and we three had a lively time, “Westerners” that we were, comparing the Eastern ways with ours. We giggled and chatted and made sport of the queer things we had encountered; mimicked the New England pronunciation, and told him about “Our Caddie”; while, in turn, he told us bits of his experience, of various places of interest, and how to get to them. Belle was especially vivacious and entertaining that day. But, after a little, she and he struck several points of variance, and differences that began in a jest soon became heated arguments. They were both Baptists, but he was liberal and she strait-laced; and while at first it was fun to watch them spar, I grew uneasy as I saw Belle’s right ear reddening—her danger signal. When she had asked him which Baptist church he attended, instead of designating it decorously, he had solemnly replied, “The church of the Holy Bean-Blowers,” referring to the four figures on its steeple with long gilt trumpets held up to their mouths. When Belle remonstrated, he declared with mock gravity that they were assuredly blowing beans all over Boston, and everybody would have them to-morrow morning for breakfast.

On leaving, Mr. Sergeant said that Canon Farrar was to preach the next day at Trinity and that if he might he would like to call and accompany me there. Had I been to Trinity yet? and heard Phillips Brooks? There would probably be a big crowd, so, if I pleased, he would call early, that we might be near the doors when they opened.

No, I—we—had not been to Trinity yet, I said, but that I—we—(with an inquiring glance at Belle) would be pleased to go. (I had not the slightest idea who Canon Farrar was, but did not ask.) Naming an early hour, and not including Belle, though I had, he took his leave. Belle was furious, declared she would not go, but did go when the hour came the next day.

There was a big crowd waiting by the closed doors of Trinity. Belle, being tall, was left to shift for herself in the crowd. I remember how pleasant it was—an utterly new sensation—to be piloted and shielded and gently pushed along in that well-bred crowd by my new acquaintance. Towering above me he smiled down indulgently as we were jostled this way and that. Soon I was swept off my feet and packed so closely that the crowd bore me along, Mr. Sargeant near by assuring me that there was no danger; that this was only the eagerness of the Bostonians to attend church. Presently the big doors opened; the surging mass of people carried me forward; in the vestibule I found my footing, and we were soon seated in the great, dark, holy Trinity.

We heard the English divine whose “Life of Christ” I have since read. His voice was not big enough to fill the church. I could not understand him, and was not at all impressed, but for other reasons the day was memorable. I was strangely moved by the church itself. When I go back to Boston now, one of the things I care most to do is to go down the little side street by which I approached, and come suddenly upon Trinity as I saw it that first day. The vine on its gray walls, the doves around its tower, the very stones in its huge pile, have an inexplicable charm for me; and within—it calmed and satisfied me; it seemed a worship in itself, that dim interior whose details gradually became discernible to my unsophisticated eyes. I question if any old-world cathedral could now have so profound an effect upon me as Trinity had on that girl fresh from village life, who had seen only the humble little churches of the home-town, or occasionally a more pretentious but commonplace church in a small city. Those glorious stained-glass windows! And the organ! Church and music stirred me, if the English divine did not.

(A few years ago, one summer day, I went into Trinity and sat long in the obscurity—the solitude, the silence, and the enveloping peace were inexpressibly soothing. I seemed again to feel the uplift that had always come on hearing Phillips Brooks. I thought of all that had happened to me since, as a girl, I used to hear him pour out his rapid, inspired utterances. How directly they always came to me! Tossed with doubt as I was, I never heard him without receiving help. For years he had been an uplifting influence in my life, and although I had never spoken to him, his death (when I was practising in U——) was a real loss to me—something precious then went out of my life.)

As we came out from Trinity that day, our new acquaintance proposed going into the Art Museum. Acquiescing promptly, I was annoyed to find that Belle was scandalized—“The Art Museum on Sunday! No, indeed!” And she and Mr. Sargeant began sparring, he getting very sarcastic and she very angry; but we ended by going in for a short stay, though the mental atmosphere was not propitious.

It was always a welcome break in my evenings of study when the gong would signal our room and “Theresa” the bell-girl, would announce through the tube, “Miss Arnold has a gentleman caller.” It was almost never any one but Mr. Sargeant. Down to the big reception room I would rush, eager to meet him, and not having artifice enough to conceal it, or not caring to. Other girls, receiving callers in the same room, would keep them waiting; and when they did come would enter with indifference and dignity, so unlike my prompt response to the signal. But we were both “Westerners” and understood frankness, while most of the young people there were from New England. Sometimes there would be several young men ranged around the room waiting. As each girl would appear, she would stand poised in the door-way till she discovered her caller, then, making directly for him, would be more or less oblivious to the others throughout the evening. We learned on entering the room to nod to the other “steady” callers, but there was seldom further interchange among us. As it neared ten o’clock, the young men would sit with watches in hand, talking up to the last minute, when “Theresa” would sound the gong; they would then start with a rush for the door, and we would hurry to our rooms with a pleased sense of almost having transgressed the rules; for there was but little time after that signal before lights had to be out throughout the building.

We had had a funny initiation, after the first two or three weeks in Boston, when we had moved from the Association building on Warrenton Street to the one on Berkeley Street. It was then that we came especially under the chaperonage of Miss Wilkins. That first night, at the table assigned us, we found some bright girls whom we recognized as students of some sort, as they evidently did us, but students of what, all were unaware. One fascinating girl, in a light, bantering manner, informed us of the rules and regulations of the place. We liked her vivacity, her gestures, her imitative powers. On learning that we had just come from the other building, she raised her eyes in reminiscent horror—she too, had been there. In a serio-comic way she expatiated on the disadvantages, with an exaggeration and dramatic power that won the whole table; she declared the lights had to be out at eight-thirty; that the tea-cups were hewn out of the solid rock; (they were the thickest cups I ever saw); and that no man’s voice had ever been heard in the sacred precincts. She then asked us how we had liked there, for in Boston they never say “How do you like it?” We told her we liked it well enough, but it was too far from our work, and too noisy to study much—that there had been several elocutionists who had ranted and howled so much that we found studying almost impossible. Her amusement at this egged Belle on; she grew vivacious in elaborating and rehearsing our tribulations on this score, becoming elated as they laughed gaily at her recital. And when we said that if by any chance the elocutionists gave us any peace, the musicians drummed and vocalized until the last state was worse than the first, fresh gales of laughter arose. Significant glances passed among our new acquaintances; and then the vivacious one solemnly warned us that she feared our trials had but begun; for here, she said, in addition to elocutionists and musicians who infested the place, there were night prowlers—medical students whose midnight calls disturbed the whole house. If we heard the door-bell ring vigorously at unseemly hours we must not think it meant fire or other catastrophe—it would only be the summons of the “medics” to their nocturnal sprees. All this was mingled with frank and rather disparaging comments about women medical students; and by unfeigned rejoicing when someone volunteered that a bunch of the “medics” had left yesterday; and that the staid spinster whom they pointed out to us at another table (our own Miss Wilkins) was the only one of the obnoxious ilk remaining. Belle and I exchanged glances but held our peace. But on stepping into the elevator, our table-mates with us, Miss Wilkins came also, with the matron, and there introduced us to that sober lady as her class-mates who had come over to-day from the other building, so as to be with her, and nearer the College. Our new acquaintances, astonished at this disclosure, and a bit discomfited, soon rallied; the vivacious one declared that we were now even, since she and her room-mate were elocutionist and musician respectively, and that the others at our table belonged mostly to one or the other of those reprehensible classes.

A delightful friendship grew out of all this; especially with the two girls from Maine. Agnes, the vivacious one, was studying elocution; Anna, the staid, music—the one all life and vigour; the other quiet, sombre, phlegmatic. The sprightly Agnes would amuse us by stirring up her chum—poking her in the ribs, she would say, “Anna, Anna, animation!” and Anna would laugh and blush and rouse herself to please her whimsical friend. They went with us on Saturday afternoons on our sight-seeing expeditions, and to lectures, concerts, and church; and in the evening, for the half-hour after supper, we usually allowed ourselves a chat in their room, or in ours, before buckling down to study. They were curious about our work, as were we about theirs. It was fun to hear Agnes, who attended the Brown School of Oratory, exalt it at the expense of the Emerson school; and to see her toss her head, and watch her nostrils dilate, when she argued with the Emerson girls. Sometimes we went to their recitals. Anna used to play for me by the hour, when I had time to listen, shyly pleased that her music pleased me; she was too susceptible to anything I said or did, and would have formed one of those extravagant friendships of which we were seeing so many in Boston, had I been so minded.

Our life at the Y. W. C. A. building had much in common with boarding-school life—though less restricted in many ways—a community of women, its walls seldom echoed to a man’s step or voice, except in the evening when callers came. It sounded good to hear the deep tones of “Dan,” the janitor, when he brought trunks to the rooms, or was otherwise called up from the basement. Even the elevator-boy was a girl.

As our medical books accumulated, we had need of book-shelves, but to buy a book-case, even the cheapest, was not to be thought of. There were so many expenses to be met, so many fees at College for the different courses, books to get, bones to rent, chemicals and breakages to pay for, board and laundry bills and the like, that we cut down on all else as rigorously as possible. I remember how my heart would sink at some new item of expense coming up at the College, and how I dreaded to write home about it, knowing well what a sacrifice it meant there. But to occasional expressed misgivings of mine, that I had undertaken anything requiring such an outlay, Father would always write reassuringly: “We shall manage somehow; don’t worry. One of these days you will be where you can earn money, and then we shall be glad you undertook it.” How often these cheery messages came to me during those years!

One evening we sallied forth to a shoe store and bought a long, narrow pine box for ten or fifteen cents. “Where will you have it sent?” the man asked.

“We will take it ourselves,” we replied, much to the man’s amazement and amusement. And Belle and I merrily carried the long box two or three blocks to our boarding-place. People turned and looked at us; street urchins guyed us, asking if it was our coffin; but to their jibes we answered good-humouredly—it was sport for us as well as for them. Standing the thing up on end, and making shelves of the lid, we covered it with blue paper-cambric, and when our medical books were in it, we were as proud as any girls in Boston; and it cost us about thirty cents!

We had the diversion of gymnasium practice one evening a week, after which we would come down to our room for quizzes, sitting around in our “gym” suits, which rather embarrassed Miss Wilkins, and correspondingly tickled us. Miss Thorndike did it, too, so she couldn’t very well criticize it openly.

Some evenings, sitting in our rooms studying, we would hear the street cry, “Swee-et cidah, five cents a glahss!” We feared it would be frowned upon by the staid matron if we succumbed to this enticing call, but as the cries came nearer our mouths watered. One night, deciding to risk it, seizing the hot-water pitcher and some change, down the stairs I stole, and sliding out the side door, lurked in the shadow of the building till the man and his cart came close to the curb, when, guiltily making the purchase, I stole upstairs. Safe in the room, we had our spree, becoming as exhilarated as though it had been champagne. Such simple pleasures—how they come back as I recall those student days!

One evening Belle and I closed our transom tight and lit a cigar which one of the men students had given me at college, daring me to smoke it. (And for a girl to smoke in those days was—well, most unusual.) How it smarted the lips! I didn’t like it a bit, but smoked it to the bitter end. And then we were scared, fearing the odour would penetrate the hall. Quickly airing the room, we sat down with our books and our bones; and none too soon; for down the hall came the matron, sniffing and declaring she smelled cigar smoke. We heard her high-pitched voice, heard her tapping on the doors and making the inquiry; but when she came to ours we were bending over our big books, one with a skull in her hand, the other with a long bone which was receiving close scrutiny as, in answer to her knock, we said “Come,” and looked up with feigned annoyance at the interruption. Startled at what she saw, she made a hasty retreat, or would surely have noticed that the smell of smoke was stronger there than elsewhere.

Another escapade promised to be more serious: One Sunday afternoon while reading in our room a light flashed in our window; it came again and again. We soon discovered, in a building about two blocks away, a young man with a hand-mirror and another with opera glasses. We dodged back whenever they tried to use the glasses, but as the flash kept coming, we drew our shades for an instant, piled our skull and cross-bones on the window-sill, then lifted the shade. Such antics as they went through! They were certainly taken aback. Feeling that we had checked them, we resumed our reading. Soon again came the flash and, looking out, to our amazement we saw on their window-sill also a skull and cross-bones! They were doubtless Harvard “medics.” But just as we were elated over the discovery and the curious coincidence, we heard the matron and housekeeper’s voice as they came down the hall on an investigation tour.

“It must be in one of these rooms, right along here, either on this floor or on the next,” we heard the matron say, and her fussy little tap was heard on door after door. When she came to ours no bones were in sight; one girl sat quietly writing a letter, the other was apparently taking a nap. A low “Come” from the one writing, and a hand held up in warning as the head peeped in, lest the sleeping room-mate be disturbed, satisfied the guileless matron that we were innocent. Explaining that some young ladies on that floor, or the floor above, had evidently been answering signals of some young men across the way, and that she was anxious to find out who it was, and put a stop to it, else it would bring disrepute upon our building, she left us, apologizing for the interruption. Thus ended the flirtation between the Boston University skull and the skull from Harvard!

The first real sorrow of my life came to me that year: One forenoon, as we all piled out from the lecture room and rushed to the mail-rack for our home letters, a tall blond youth who was usually on hand to lift down my microscope and sharpen my dissecting knives handed me the home letter which was always too high on the rack for me to reach—the letter which never failed to come on Tuesday noon. Running with it to the cloak room, eager for the home news, I read:

Grandpa is very ill. The Doctor says he cannot get well. “Tell Eugenie I shall never see her again,” he said last night. Perhaps you can write him a letter we can read to him. You better not try to come home. It is too far, would cost so much, and would break into your studies so.

How the sunshine vanished as my thoughts flew to that little bedroom where he lay—my dear, touchy, indulgent grandfather! I did not go to the lecture that afternoon, but stayed in the library and wrote him a farewell letter. I should like to see that letter now. I wonder what I wrote; I know nothing more genuine and tender ever went from one soul to another. Besides a loving farewell, which his approaching death made possible for me to express, reticent as I was by nature and training, it contained, I know, a passionate assurance that it would be well with him where he was going. I knew that Mother was praying and thinking, “Oh, if he were only prepared to go!” Something of this might be in his own heart, too. I thought of his ungodly life, of his profanity; but against these I weighed his uprightness and his big loving heart, and I knew that these would count—count with what I was no wise sure; but I knew that it was right thus to try to ease the terrors of his last hours, if such were troubling him. It was the passionate protest of my struggling mind, becoming tinctured with Unitarianism and Universalism, against the suffering that I knew was Mother’s (if, indeed, it was not Grandpa’s also), with her Methodist way of looking at things. Somehow, I could see my grandfather, sturdy to the last, scorning weakly to repent, even to escape the terrors of the Unknown into which he must soon go.

He never saw that letter. Whether he became unconscious before it reached there; or whether Mother in her zeal felt that it might prevent his last chance of repentance; or whether, because of its passionate, perhaps hysterical, character, it was deemed by my parents better withheld, I never knew. I was unwilling to inquire when, months later, I reached home. Mother said it seemed best only to tell him of my good-bye. Perhaps it was; but I wonder if he didn’t know without seeing it—I felt very near him that hour in the library framing my farewell, and learning for the first time what it means when Death comes to our own.

After some months, Belle and I took a larger room at the Y. W. C. A., and a girl in the class ahead of us joined us—a quiet, amiable girl who acted as a kind of buffer between us, after which we got on much more comfortably.

One evening she took me with her to a confinement case on which she and a senior student were engaged. It was my first experience in dispensary quarters, and the sordid surroundings, the mean tenements, the poverty and misery were a revelation to me. Everything was untidy and unclean. I could not bear even to sit on the chairs. The night was long; the groans of the woman were painful to hear. Being only a junior, with no knowledge of obstetrics, I had little intelligent interest in the case. I gathered from the low conferences of the students, after their frequent examinations, that all was not progressing satisfactorily; and some time after midnight they told me they would need to call in the professor in obstetrics, since it promised to be a case for instrumental interference. Undergraduates were not allowed to assume charge of such cases unaided.

The senior student and I went for the professor. I had never been on the street at so late an hour, and felt a pleasurable excitement in the adventure. I dreaded most those mean streets through which we had to go before reaching the more respectable quarters. We had gone only a short way when our progress was arrested by a night-prowler, though no more formidable one than a goat. On nearing Boylston Street we met a few men and saw an occasional policeman. Everyone we passed showed more or less curiosity, and one policeman halted near us, but said nothing, Miss Farnsworth’s obstetric bag perhaps indicating to him and others that we were out on some legitimate errand.

Presently my heart almost stopped: A man stepping alongside Miss Farnsworth had caught step and was walking by her side without a word. Glancing up at her in apprehension, I saw her face was pale and stern, but she looked straight ahead, apparently oblivious of his presence. Soon I felt her crowding me, and saw he was pushing close to her side; but she neither slackened her pace nor betrayed awareness of him. My heart was going like a trip-hammer, but somehow I felt secure, she seemed so unmoved. Soon the man ceased crowding, lifted his hat, and in a deferential tone said, “I beg your pardon, ladies,” and walked on. We walked on, too, not speaking till he had disappeared from sight; then the imperturbable young woman, with trembling voice, told me she had heard that that was the best way to treat such an encounter, but that it was the first time she had had to test the advice.

Professor S—— went back with us and delivered the child.

I heard Lowell lecture two or three times that first year—conversational talks and readings from the early English dramatists. I liked his scholarly face and voice, and felt the charm of his manner, but recall almost nothing of his talks. In reading he pronounced ocean “o-ce-an.”

One day in walking down Tremont Street, as we halted at Miss Thorndike’s boarding-house, we saw a stout, middle-aged woman in the window, who nodded pleasantly to Miss Thorndike: “That is the poet, Lucy Larcom,” she whispered, to our awed surprise.

We used to go to King’s Chapel just to see Dr. Holmes, who always sat in the same place in the gallery—the little old man, looking somewhat sleepy and very remote, but very fitting in that quaint old meeting-house. I first read his books in Boston, and it was such a delight in walking across the Common to realize that it was amid these very scenes that he had written the “Autocrat” and the “Professor.”

It was a notable day when we went to Cambridge and visited Harvard University, the Old Craigie House, the Washington Elm, and Mount Auburn. Then there were the trips to Charlestown and Bunker Hill, and the Navy Yard—these soon after our arrival there—it all seemed like stepping out of real life into a novel. What a glamour there was over everything! I remember my awed feeling on gaining admission to Longfellow’s home, when, standing in the darkened study, we saw his table, his books and papers, they said, just as he had left them. I had then scarcely emerged from the spell of his poems, and, as we looked on the River Charles that afternoon, and thought of the poet standing in the very places where we stood; then, on returning to Boston across the long bridge, saw the lights reflected in the dark waters, and the stream of people hurrying to and fro, it all seemed a beautiful, sacred experience, linked as it was, with the Sunday afternoons at home, when I used to sing Father to sleep with “The Bridge” and “The Day Is Done.” “The Bridge” may have meant London Bridge, but to me it will ever be that long bridge spanning the Charles, over which we returned to Boston after our pilgrimage to the poet’s home.

Mary A. Livermore’s lecture on Harriet Martineau was an event of that annus mirabilis; I sent reports of it home to our village paper, having previously written up several of our noteworthy excursions in and around Boston. This had begun by Brother letting the editor of the paper read one of my home letters, which he subsequently published, my first intimation of it being its discovery in the paper.

I heard Joseph Cook lecture on the Indians, and heard Will Carlton read some of his own poems, and tried to be impressed with each, but was not. But I heard Beecher and was impressed without trying. He lectured on the Conscience; he said some persons’ consciences were like livery horses—they kept them all saddled and bridled and ready to let, but never used them themselves.

My first play in Boston was Booth in “Hamlet,” and I was a bit disappointed, having expected to be swept off my feet; instead, I found myself coolly watching it all, interested, but calmly, almost critically so, if a girl at her first real play can be critically interested. But when I saw J. Wilson Barrett in “The Poet Chatterton” I was moved, and forgot everything but the woes of that ill-fated youth whose suffering and tragic death Barrett made so real. My throat ached and the tears fell fast as the frenzied poet on his knees before an old chest frantically destroyed his rejected manuscripts. I wonder if the same thing would not seem melodramatic now.

Toward the close of our first year several of the students were invited to Cambridge to visit the Agassiz Museum, and take supper with one of our class-mates. It was the first time I had been in a home in all that year, and I shall never forget the feeling that came over me after those months spent in a large institution with its huge dining room, and a hundred or more girls at table: to sit down in a real home once more, and see a real mother pouring tea; to hear “Anna” called by her given name, and see all the intimate home life, was a precious experience. Until then I had not realized how homesick I had been. I wondered if they knew how beautiful it all was—they seemed so calm about it, so unconcerned, while in spite of all I could do my tears were crowding fast. No one but Belle had called me by my given name since I had left home, eight long months before; that “Anna” in the mother’s voice made me hungry to hear my own name. I recall how odd it sounded to hear them speak of “Mr.” Longfellow, and “Mr. Agassiz,” as they recounted every-day things about them. From their talk one would think they came and went around Cambridge like ordinary persons! It seemed as if this casual manner of speaking of these great men must be assumed.

Among the revelations of that first year were the vehement women friendships we saw in Boston. Of course I had known of extravagant girl friendships, schoolgirls, but these were women, and they acted like lovers. There was something unpleasant in it to me, even before I learned, as I did in later years, that such companionships sometimes degenerate into perverted associations. Not that this was the case in any of the women I knew, but I had no liking for the peculiar, absorbing feminine intimacies I saw at the College, at the Association, and wherever I had near views of the lives of New England women. Even “Our Caddie” had a beautiful senior student who adored her—a tall, dark dignified maiden. They were said to be inseparable outside of college precincts; a strange contrast, this pair! There were several “pairs” in the senior class, and among the “middlers,” and even with the juniors they sprang up like mushrooms. They gazed at each other soulfully; they lived and thought in unison, communicating by glances rather than by the crudity of the spoken word. I felt inclined to ridicule them, yet there were some who were restrained in conduct, and who seemed so unmistakably congenial that their attention for each other, singular as it was to me, commanded respect. Still I was wont to say that if ever I did fall in love, it would be with a man.

It seemed to surprise the students of both sexes when it dawned upon them that Belle and I were not that kind of friends. Miss Thorndike, our Buffalo friend, attracted the prim Miss Wilkins in this same way. It amused Belle and me to see Miss Wilkins actually blush at little attentions from Miss Thorndike; but Belle herself soon succumbed to the strange attraction: One night after a quiz held at Miss Thorndike’s room, Belle having lingered behind a little, on joining me, grasped my hand and fervently whispered, “Genie! Miss Thorndike kissed me good night!” I could feel only pitying amusement at such extravagance. Miss Thorndike evidently enjoyed such triumphs; she tried to get me under her spell. The more I saw of her, I saw that certain girls and women were always falling a victim to her. Years later a sickly, neurotic girl became so absorbed in her as to become almost estranged from her family; she lived merely to bask in the Doctor’s presence—distinctly an unhealthy relation. My own instincts from the first led me to avoid such associations. In the years that followed, coming upon such attachments, I clearly saw how it hampered women in their work, the “vinewoman” acting like a parasite to the more rugged, energetic personality; the latter having a multiplicity of interests, while the clinging vine would be wretched at any interests in which she did not have the lion’s share; in fact, was always chary of sharing her inamorata with others to any degree.

There was a lackadaisical girl in our class, several years older than I, who had been thus inclined toward me. I did not understand it at first. She followed me about, trying to absorb my time and attention, eager to do all sorts of little services for me; but I quickly put a stop to it, though having to seem unkind in doing it. And there was a married woman in our class who attempted a like attachment. One night when several of us were discussing this topic, I must have spoken of myself as bullet proof, as I ridiculed such folly. Suddenly this student seized and kissed me, not once or twice, but several times, fiercely, almost brutally. Surprised and indignant, I was actually weak and unresisting for a moment, the others looking and laughing while this aggressive creature triumphed and sparkled as she said, “There! that is the way I would make you love me!” There were but two ways to treat her assault—as a jest, or an indignity—I chose the former, and shunned her throughout the rest of the course. I had disliked her glittering black eyes and her personality anyhow, and this incident only strengthened my instinctive repugnance.

Still another student, one of the juniors when I was “middler,” showed a romantic inclination toward me: I had befriended her in little ways because she seemed forlorn, and because I remembered every little kindness shown me during the first year. She was of the pronounced masculine type and seemed to glory in it, was careless in dress; unprepossessing, and with a heavy voice. She was docile as a lamb with me, and I succeeded in getting her to abandon some of her mannish ways, and to be more mindful of her appearance. She would have been my willing slave; but her devotion was irksome and I nipped it in the bud; I neither wanted to adore, nor to be adored. Even at their best, these inordinate attachments seem like outlets into a false channel—the natural one being impeded. They affect me much as does a woman’s silly devotion to a pet dog when, failing to find its natural outlet, her maternal love degenerates, descending to the dog-kennel, instead of blessing the nursery.

The religious qualms and questions of my school days were still actively disturbing during that first college year, and I did not cease trying to get on comfortable footing concerning them, though knowing it could never be on the old footing. Miss Wilkins, a good orthodox Congregationalist, listening sympathetically to my doubts and difficulties, attempted to help me, finally urging me to let the doubts go and just pray. I tried hard to follow her advice. On my knees alone I prayed earnestly, but could get no awareness of a listening Father; still I prayed, but soon, to my shame and sorrow (and, yes, to my amusement, too), my mind having wandered, I found myself repeating the branches of the axillary artery which I had been studying that evening! I arose with a helpless feeling, convinced that it was useless to try further. The next day when I told Miss Wilkins, grieved, but a bit amused, too, she shook her head—at a loss whether to scold or to pet me.

As soon as our first-year “exams” were over I was wild to get home. Shall I ever look forward to anything with the eagerness I looked to that first home-going? Belle, who had gone at the Christmas holidays, was less eager. I had set the date of arrival a day later than I intended reaching there, just to surprise them. When, on nearing Utica we saw the fertile Mohawk valley, in such contrast to the stony, more picturesque scenery of New England, we grew wild with delight. This was the home country; we were no longer on alien soil. And when the drumlins came in sight, we jumped from side to side of the car, hungrily regarding them. The conductor and the few passengers smiled indulgently; they knew we were going home! That final twenty-five-mile stretch was interminable, and when, at the last stop but one, three miles from our station, we saw our own drumlins, and the familiar houses and trees, my heart leaped for joy. My eyes were blinded with happy tears when the train pulled in.

There was the very platform on which I had stood in the darkness months ago and torn myself from my sister’s embrace! There was the dear old rattly “stage” and the familiar driver to take us to the village! How good everyone about the station looked! I felt like hugging everybody. Our trunks were put on; the horses started; the bells jingled; the windows rattled in the old coach as we jolted along all too slowly over the mile that lay between me and Home!

It was a beautiful summer evening. I glanced hungrily from the windows at every familiar sight—it all seemed so real, yet so incredible—here were the old scenes just as I had known them, unchanged, when so much had been happening to me! “Unchanged?” But there was a change, a glamour over everything, a light that never had been, and never could be again—the light in which one sees a dear, familiar scene on returning to it after his first absence! When we got to the “corner”—the top of the hill that leads down to our house—I climbed out and ran ahead to surprise them before they should hear the stage-bells. I can see myself now, flying down the hill in the June twilight, and running up the steps into Mother’s arms, almost before she knew who it was. Home again, among the four beings I loved best in all the world! If one wants to know how much he loves home and family, let him go away in his youth to a distant city for long months, then let him come back to that shelter and learn to the full the blessedness, the sacred joy of all that is comprised in that word “Home”!

How late we talked that night! Neighbours and friends flocked in to see the wanderer; how good they all looked! but how odd their voices sounded—every r in their words stood out with such distinctness, after hearing the broad a’s and the softened r’s of the New England pronunciation. I spoke of the peculiarities of the New England speech; how funny it had seemed to hear the College professors speak of idears; how the chemistry professor talked of sodar ash, and, unless she was very careful, the Maine elocutionist called her room-mate “Annar”; of how affected it seemed to omit their r’s in words where they should be, and insert them where they did not belong. I said I had noticed a decided difference in Belle’s speech, although she had ridiculed it as much as I did when we went there. While I was speaking of this, a smile went round the family circle, finally they laughed outright.

“What are you all laughing at?” I asked, a bit nettled. They said they guessed Belle was not the only one who had taken on the Boston pronunciation.

“Do you mean me?” I asked incredulously.

“We certainly do.” They had been amused ever since I had arrived to note the change in my speech.

After we had been home a few days my mark in anatomy came. Belle and I had been so scared when we had gone into “Our Caddie’s” examination, that we had cared little about what marks we would get, if we could only squeeze through. On opening the envelope I thought there must be some mistake, for there was my name and number and my standing (in “Our Caddie’s” own handwriting)—“100 plus 1.” She had deigned to write on the card: “This means that you stood ninety-nine on your paper, and, with twenty perfect plus marks in quizzes, it makes your standing 100 plus 1. One other in the class stood the same.” Miss Thorndike was that other. It was always a puzzle to us both that she and I received this high rating from the exacting Dr. Matson, for others in the class were unquestionably better students than we were. My rejoicing, however, was keen—until I thought of what Belle would say; but she was off in the country, and I did not see her for some weeks; still there was that fly in the ointment.

During that vacation I took the agency for a book called “Milestones,” and went about the village canvassing—distasteful work, but I cleared fifty dollars by the means. One day when storm-stayed in a poor little house on the east side of the town, an unforgettable experience came to me. I usually found my best customers in such houses, and rather enjoyed their rapt attention as I expatiated on the treasures in the book; for, discarding the printed tale which the publishers had advised agents to use, I adapted myself to each audience in turn, selecting for bait the pictures and articles that I thought they would best jump at. Sometimes, under their interested attention, I would wax eloquent. I always knew in advance when an order was forthcoming, but enjoyed quite as much getting my victim on the hook as securing the order. As I waited that day in the little house till the rain should cease, a big, strapping neighbour, rushing in out of the storm, puffing and red-faced, blurted out, “John Stevens’s girl’s dead—died at four o’clock.” Little did she or the others know! To them it was just a piece of village news, yet this girl was my dearest friend! I had known her death was near, but to learn of it in that squalid home, and from this loud-mouthed woman, seemed a desecration. I sat very still till the rain ceased, hearing their talk as in a dream.

Our old cat’s time had come to go that summer, and I decided that I might relieve it of its existence, at the same time that I could add to my knowledge of comparative anatomy, and give the children in our street some instruction as well. So, improvising a place in our back-yard under the Baldwin apple tree, I started out bravely to chloroform the cat. But its writhings were too much for me; and Sister and our neighbour, Walter, had to take that part off my hands; the rest I did without a qualm, instructing the big-eyed, eager children about the muscles and viscera, and enjoying the amusing questions they asked.

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CHAPTER IX The “Medic”—Continued

Our Caddie’s greeting was a pleasant surprise when we went back to College that second year. Stopping me and beaming on me, she congratulated me warmly on my anatomy paper:

“Frankly, Miss Arnold, I was astonished when I learned it was your paper. You seldom did yourself justice in quizzes, it seems.” Even to this graciousness I was so constrained I could only blush and look pleased; but some years later when she visited in the city where I was practising, and I was driving out with her and another woman physician, I confessed my former fear. How she laughed and melted! Then, turning suddenly, she asked in her old manner,

“Did you think I would eat you?” For an instant I almost trembled, as in the old days, but her merry smile soon followed. Since then the utmost cordiality has existed between us.

The second year in College was the busiest. We had more studies, more instructors, and a more varied life in every way. They lectured us on disease-conditions and on the remedies to be applied. There were the various clinics in the dispensary department—throat clinics, chest clinics, women’s clinics, surgical clinics, children’s clinics, and so on, where, under the various instructors, we were required to examine and diagnose cases and to watch the result of treatment. Patients too ill to come to the clinics were visited in their homes by the senior students, and by the “middlers” after the first half of their second year. Before taking cases, however, we went with the seniors on their visits to get a little familiar with the work. Once on going with a senior to an obstetric case, we found the baby already born, and the cord tied and cut! A half-witted sister of the patient met us at the door; the woman lay on the bed with no sheets on it; the new baby, naked and cold, was crying vigorously; and, playing on the bed beside the mother, was a little five-year-old who had been there through the labour. It seems when the baby came and the patient had told her sister to cut the cord, the sister refusing, the woman had sat up in bed and cut it herself!

What a mass of instruction was thrust upon us that second year! I enjoyed most the lectures of our professor in materia medica. A charming man, enthusiastic, fluent, apt at illustration—a more ready and engaging speaker I have never heard. Taking all he said as gospel-truth, I was not a little disturbed toward the close of that year to hear the seniors insinuate that he never spoiled a story for the truth’s sake; that he would tell of some wonderful case one year, ascribing the favourable termination to a certain remedy, and the next year would forget and tell of it under quite another remedy! Each disclosure of this kind came as a shock; it was so difficult—it is, even now—to believe that people are not what they seem.

One man, our professor in pathology, never swerved one jot or tittle from the truth. This trait was so strong that he seemed always to be telling us what not to believe; he was for ever exposing shams and false theories, dubbing them “all fol-de-rol.” He gave us clear, concise pictures of diseases; told what measures to adopt to relieve them; what remedies to rely on, so far as remedies could be of service; but never failed to impress upon us that “the books lie, and doctors lie,” if they claim that cases follow the typical courses so beautifully pictured; or that remedies, however well selected, will invariably relieve. There was a touch of peevishness in his attempts to make us chary about believing the stock statements in the books. I had a great liking for him; his earnestness appealed to me. Abrupt and brusque as he was, on the rare occasions when he smiled, his smile had that distinctive charm that an infrequent smile always lends to a stern, serious face. He was an excellent offset to the optimism and enthusiasm of our professor in materia medica.

(A few years ago he came on as guest of honour and read a paper at our State Medical Society meeting in Brooklyn. He looked much older, his hair was thinned and white, but his voice had the old scornful ring, and carried me back to those student days in Boston; every familiar inflection was a fresh delight; and to make it more realistic, there was dear Dr. Wilkins who had come on, too—the Miss Wilkins who had so mothered me in college—past and present were strangely blended that day: on the platform Dr. “Conrad,” whose tones made me a student again; by my side the class-mate who had sat with me in the old days and listened to those same tones; while all around me were also friends and associates of to-day, else I surely should have felt myself a girl again and back in the old lecture room.)

Our professor in throat diseases was no favourite with the students. He had a smooth face, china-blue eyes, and wore a brown wig. We thought him vain, and knew he was irritable; and we failed to get much out of his lectures or clinics. Once I asked him to go with me in consultation to a home where I suspected my case was diphtheria; he went and, confirming my diagnosis with alacrity, hurried out of the house, showing such personal apprehension that it made me feel a bit contemptuous. He asked me if I were not afraid of it, and advised me, wisely, to send the case at once to the city hospital, which I did.

The same professor whom we had had the first year in the History of Medicine, instructed us in diseases of the chest; friendly and approachable, he gave us good lectures and valuable clinics.

The Dean, bless his heart! lectured to us on surgery. He always seemed in a hurry; he was an easy talker. Some of the students were inclined to belittle his skill as an operator, though admitting that he had been an excellent surgeon in his palmier days. Anyhow, he had force and charm, and was an indefatigable worker, and a warm-hearted, tactful man.

In obstetrics we had an able man, friendly, alert, conscientious, and a good instructor.

The professor in diseases of women was a pretty, fascinating woman, a general favourite; she had a big practice over on the Back Bay. We students thought her charmingly inefficient as a lecturer; it was a pleasure to look at her, and to listen to her, but her lectures were thin, and her clinics disappointing. I could so seldom find what she would tell us we ought to find in the cases, and when I would say I couldn’t, she would smile in her bewitching way and say, “Oh, but you must, it is there”; and then I would try again, often unsuccessfully, while she seemed to have little aptitude to make me find the thing in question. Somehow, we got in the way of not taking her very seriously; but, come to think of it, it is hardly fair to single her out as the cause of my stupidity, for there were clinics of the other professors as well, where I failed to find conditions we were told existed. I suppose it was the untrained student’s incapacity for seeing, hearing, and feeling what the trained clinician sees, hears, and feels so easily.

The man who lectured to us on gunshot wounds always came in the amphitheatre as though he had been shot out of a gun himself. His lectures were clear and to the point.

The lecturer on electro-therapeutics was a pleasing, gentle person; the one on diseases of children a trig, dapper little man; and there were other branches—medical chemistry, skin diseases, diseases of eye and ear, and so on—assuredly a busy year.

When, the latter half of the year, we were allowed to take cases, they were assigned us in alphabetical order. Each student before receiving his degree must have himself managed at least thirty medical, five surgical, and three obstetrical cases; although he was at liberty when necessary to ask a senior to accompany him, and, in grave cases, to call on the Faculty.

All that we knew of our cases till visiting them in their homes was the name and address furnished by the house-physician at the Dispensary. How exciting those first calls—wondering what we should find! I well remember the first visit I started out alone to make with my new little medicine-case under my arm: “Lynch, 846 Albany Street” was the legend supplied at the Dispensary.

The place was in a somewhat better locality than many I had visited in company with seniors. Mounting the stairs, I knocked in some trepidation as I realized I was about to undertake alone my first patient. What would it be? Should I be able, after examining her, to know what ailed her? and what to do for her? A strapping big Irish woman came to the door.

“Does Mrs. Lynch live here?” I asked in as professional a tone as I could summon, to which she grudgingly admitted that she did.

“I am the doctor from the Dispensary, I would like to see her.”

“I am Mrs. Lynch,” she said, without opening the door further, “but I’ll have you understand my son is pretty sick—it is no time to fool around; I sent for a doctor, not for a little girl.”

I can see myself as I stood there; can feel just how taken aback and indignant I was; how helpless I felt; but it was only momentary. Pocketing my anger, I said quietly but firmly, “I am the doctor who has been sent to you; if your son is very ill, you must let me see him at once.” She hesitated, but I added that if, after I prescribed for him, she preferred to have a man doctor, in the morning, I would send one instead. I chose to relinquish the case, if need be, on the ground of sex rather than youth, thus seeming to preserve my dignity.

She wavered as though not intending to let me in, but I looked at her compellingly, and, with an ungracious snort, she led the way to the sick-room.

There lay a young coal-driver of twenty-five, with high fever, pains in head and limbs and around his heart, and the fear that he was going to die—a case of rheumatic fever. He looked disappointed as I came in, but was civil; he was too apprehensive to reject even my feeble help. After listening to the history of the onset, I took his pulse and temperature, asked my questions, which at first the mother refused to answer, but her son answered them; and, as the examination progressed, she herself vouchsafed bits of information, showing some lessening of hostility. Prescribing, and giving strict and explicit directions about medicine and diet, on leaving, I said, “I will come early in the morning to see how he is; if you then wish a male physician, I will have one sent for the next visit.” She was less uncivil as she showed me out.

I prescribed rhus toxicodendron. That very afternoon the lecturer had discussed the remedy. My case seemed made to order for it. Though prescribing without a moment’s hesitation, still I rushed home and looked up my notes, and studied the subject in the books, finding to my satisfaction that the remedy was well prescribed. In those days one had abundant faith that the remedies, if correctly applied, that is, if the true similimum be found, would do all they promised. My class-mates laughed at my rebuff, but congratulated me on effecting an entrance, and on the selection of the remedy.

Early in the morning I hastened to my patient. At the door the big woman met me with the warmth and cordiality that only an Irish woman can Show when so disposed:

“Come in, Doctor, come right in; my son do be feelin’ better, God bless you!”

Of course he was better; had I not given him rhus tox when all his symptoms called for it? I have since wondered what I should have thought, or done, had my patient failed to respond to the remedy; but there he was, surprisingly better, it was plain to see.

It was my time for revenge: Treating the woman’s warmth with the same apparent indifference that I had her insolence, I allowed myself an outlet for my satisfaction in cordiality to my patient. Going carefully over his symptoms I found him indeed better, though still far from well, and this I told him. Mixing fresh medicine, and giving fresh directions as to his care, I told him he ought to get on nicely now; and then, turning to the woman, said, “To-morrow I will have one of the male physicians make the visit.”

The patient began to protest, and the woman herself to show disappointment:

“Oh, no, Doctor, I guess you’ll do as well as anybody.” But I wickedly replied that I thought she would be better pleased to have another doctor, and I could easily arrange it. Then she pleaded with me not to throw up the case—no one could do so well—her son would get worse if he had a change of doctors, and so on. So, not wishing to excite my patient, and thinking I had punished her enough, I condescended to keep the case. He made a good recovery, and Mrs. Lynch was one of my staunchest advocates after that, recommending me to her neighbours in glowing praise. She also recommended her son to me: “Mike do be thinkin’ a lot of you, Doctor, for savin’ his life. He’s a good boy, is Mike, and will make someone a good man; he gets twinty dollars a month, and has no bad habits, Doctor. Sure an’ a woman might do worse. But Mike says, he says to me, ‘Now, Mother, you do be talkin’ nonsense—the Doctor ain’t for the loikes of me.’”

I can laugh now at the rebuffs I met on account of my youth, not only when in College, but even when practising in U——, but it was hard to laugh at them then. Hence, I suppose, the dignity I instinctively assumed to make up for my short stature and lack of years. I learned, toward the close of my medical course, that it had been customary among the students to speak of me as “the dignified little Miss Arnold.” This dignity was no pose. I was dreadfully in earnest, and felt keenly this drawback to success. There was Miss Wilkins in the same class, no older than I as a doctor, but her years and her spectacles were passports to immediate acceptance, and she got credit for being wise where I was scarcely tolerated. Exasperation was no name for it! I lost one obstetrical case in my third year just because of this: After I had made my first visit, the patient sent me a polite note saying her husband was unwilling to go so far as my boarding-place for a doctor; that she would have liked to have me, and hoped I wouldn’t be offended—all a pretense—she was afraid to trust herself in my hands. Under this suddenly terminated record in my note-book I wrote with a sigh, “Oh, for the bonnet and spectacles of Miss Wilkins!” Even within a few months of graduation, while shopping for a cloak, I was chagrined to have the saleswoman tell the taller, but younger, girl who, accompanying me, acted as spokesman, “Oh, you will have to take her into the misses’ department.” The “misses’ department,” indeed! and I almost ready to take my degree! and I would have to be taken in—I could not even go there myself! It amuses me now to recall what a sore point this was with me.

During my second year, Sister came on to Boston to take up nursing. What delight when she landed there! She looked so pretty, and I was so overjoyed to have her there, so proud of her, so eager to show her about and introduce her to my friends! She had been over to the hospital only a week when one day, between lectures, one of the young men came to me and said, “Miss Arnold, there’s an awful nice little thing out in the hall wants to see you.” Just then another rushed up and said, “Miss Arnold, if you’re not in here, you’re out in the hall, and you want to see yourself.” I ran out and found Kate in her nurse’s garb, smiling, blushing, and enjoying having these young men dance attendance on her. I was flattered that they had seen so marked a resemblance when she was so much more attractive than I.

Not wishing to pledge herself to the two-year course, Kate stayed at the hospital only during the probationer’s term, deciding that she would go home and say Yes to the wooer to whom distance was lending enchantment. But she occupied herself with private nursing in and around Boston till I went home in June. Once she just missed an opportunity to go as companion to the invalid wife of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, but an unkind Providence prevented—she having accepted a case in that city. How I bewailed her untimely absence—actually to have been in the same house with the dear Autocrat! I was almost tempted to go myself—medicine or no medicine.

During that second year, Dr. “Conrad” asked for volunteers for drug-provings among the students: A drug was prepared for each prover with directions for taking, and whatever symptoms were experienced while taking it were to be recorded in a little book, whether we thought them due to the drug or not. The provers were enjoined not to compare notes, but to turn in their reports at a stated time. I was one of six to volunteer.

For a few days I had only the slightest symptoms to record, but after that there developed an intestinal disturbance which gradually became pronounced. I began to get interested, wondering if it was really the drug that was responsible—those tiny tasteless powders—so, doubting it, kept on with the medicine. I suppose I was a little skeptical because of a rumour that they always gave some of the provers saccharum lactis, and that not infrequently records were turned in with a long string of symptoms, when the provers had only been given sac. lac. Naturally I did not want to attribute symptoms to drug action if I were not taking a real drug; so, though growing worse and worse, I kept on with the proving. The day came for our examination in pathology by the very professor who had solicited the provings—our skeptical pessimist. Uncomfortably ill by that time, I could hardly hold out to take the examination. Miss Wilkins had insisted that if I did not go to see Dr. “Conrad” immediately afterwards, she would go herself, so as I handed in my paper, I told him I was ill, and would like to call at his office in the afternoon. I added that I was one of the drug-provers, but was not sure whether this illness had anything to do with what I had been taking. He bent upon me those scrutinizing eyes, his face stern but kindly, and said, “Poor child, why didn’t you tell me before? How have you sat through the examination? Go home at once, and come to me at two o’clock.”

That afternoon I went to his office on Commonwealth Avenue—a luxurious place, a side of life that, as students, we saw only from the outside, our entrée in Boston houses being chiefly in those of the Lynches, the Sullivans, and O’Gradys. The kind, fatherly look he bent upon me as he drew me in his office and listened to my confused, embarrassed tale, was worth it all. Weak and in pain, I was unable to tell a clear story. He snatched my note-book, read the symptoms, looking up every few minutes, then read on, after which he gave me a soothing talk, and I have loved him ever since. Though commending my zeal, he deplored the fact that I had carried it to the extent of suffering so much.

“No one else did it—no one else did it,” he scolded, half to himself. “They turned in their worthless notes before the time was up, pretending they had taken the drugs faithfully when I knew they hadn’t; some of them got symptoms on taking sac. lac.—a good list of them! but you wanted to be sure yourself—that is the only way to get at the truth.”

Who would not have been willing to suffer to get this from the stern Dr. “Conrad?” Rigidly prescribing my diet and rest, he gave me some medicine and sent me home in his carriage, calling on me that evening to my delight. In two days I was as well as ever. I learned later that it was mercury that I had proved, but in so weak a potency that he had been surprised at the results.

That same year I experimented with atropine in my eyes (a silly, risky thing to do), applying it just to see how I would look with the pupils widely dilated, little knowing how it would incapacitate me for my work. Putting in a tiny bit just before starting for College one morning, by the time I got there I could not see to take notes or to read, and it was only a day or two before “exams”!

For one of the meetings of our College Society, I was given the subject materia medica to treat in any way I chose. Having just been reading the “medicated novels” of Dr. Holmes—“Elsie Venner” and “The Guardian Angel”—I thought it would be fun to take a case described in one of them, as given in the nurse’s report, ask the students to diagnose it and prescribe, leading them at the start to think it a bona fide case. The one I chose, I myself diagnosed as one of globus hystericus, and decided what remedy I would give, were she a real patient. Then it occurred to me that it would be interesting to know what our professor in materia medica would prescribe for such a case in real life; and that it would add to the interest if I could tell the students that I would give them Prof. S——’s prescription after they had submitted theirs.

I had no intention of deceiving the professor when I first thought of going to him, but growing bold on arrival, as I handed him the paper with the symptoms copied off verbatim, told him I was especially anxious to prescribe carefully for this case, as it had come into my hands from a prominent old school physician.

As he read, his eyes twinkled at the nurse’s phraseology; he looked up at me once or twice, curiously, as I sat there scared, then, at what I had done. Seeing my pencilled diagnosis with a question mark at the bottom, he said:

“Yes, you have diagnosed the case correctly beyond a doubt, and now for the remedy—I see you have three suggested, but first, let me know more about the case.” Then he plied me with questions. By this time I was greatly embarrassed; a suspicious twinkle in his eye, as he remarked that the nurse herself must be a unique person, made me uncomfortable. Finally he queried, “Who is this ‘old school physician’ who had the case?”

“Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes,” I confessed timorously.

How he laughed! Hastening to explain and apologize, I told him how I had come to present the case to him, and that only on the spur of the moment had I conceived the idea of offering it as a real case. He had seen from the start that there was something queer, but was at a loss to unravel the mystery. After a jolly chat about it, he discussed the symptoms as seriously with me as though it had been a case in real life; so I went to the Society meeting in great glee, hoodwinking them until their answers were turned in, then telling them the whole story.

The experiences of that second-year vacation kept pace with the advance in our studies. Uncles, aunts, and cousins, school-mates, neighbours, and chance acquaintances came rehearsing their aches and pains, expecting me in my inexperience to help them promptly. I took them all seriously. I was a good listener, but was often of little further help. So many of them had complaints about which we had as yet had no lectures. Still I had the hope and confidence that go with youth, and the temerity to “rush in” where the more experienced might fear to tread.

The coloured woman who did our washing asked me to attend her in confinement—her confidence in me was touching; for, although we had had our lectures in obstetrics, and I had been to a few cases with seniors, I had then managed none myself. But Josie had had several children so would be likely, I thought, to have an easy time; and, if I should need help, I could call on Dr. Campbell—the physician for whom I had had the girlish infatuation.

It was a hot Fourth of July when they called me. Josie’s poor little home was a paradise in neatness and order compared to those I had frequented in dispensary practice. I felt quite elated at the prospect of managing a case alone. But from my first examination I felt uneasy, seeing that I had a different condition to deal with than any encountered in my limited experience. As labour progressed, to my consternation I found the cord, instead of the head, presenting, so knew that I had a case of transverse presentation—one which would require turning and speedy delivery to save the child. Of course I was incompetent to do this, nor would it have been lawful to attempt it, being an undergraduate.

Dr. Campbell responded promptly to my summons, performed version, and delivered the child and the adherent placenta. I managed the after-care without difficulty. Josie was glad of her enforced rest in bed. In the days preceding her confinement I had gone past her house and seen her, big with child, standing at the ironing-board, late at night, thus supporting her family while her great lazy husband, John Wesley Freeman, would loll about all day, then sit by her at night and read the Bible and exhort as she stood ironing. True to his name, he felt called to preach, and, failing a larger audience, preached to poor Josie, in and out of season. While I kept her in bed, the lazy fellow had to shift for himself or starve, as his swarming offspring were too small to be of service in the household.

One morning, on finding Josie worse, and learning that John Wesley had been preaching to her the night before, and scolding her because she had fallen asleep, I berated him soundly. It was a good time to chastise him generally; to warn him against deeds of omission and commission. So I set forth how near Josie had come to losing her life, and said she probably would not live through another pregnancy. When I had done, in his drawling, falsetto voice, and with a sanctimonious air, he said:

“Yes, Miss ’Genia, I reckon she was mighty sick, but she’s gettin’ on now, and you know, Miss ’Genia, the Bible says we chillun must be fruitful and multiply and ’plenish the earth; and, Miss ’Genia, we sholy must do as the good Book says.”

More exasperated than amused, I snapped out:

“Well, John Wesley, I think you have done your share toward being fruitful and multiplying and replenishing the earth—I guess the Lord will excuse you if you turn around now and help Josie to support the ones you have on hand.”

But he didn’t; he continued compliant to his favourite text; and after one or two more evidences of his cheerful obedience came, Josie left her wash-tub and ironing-board forever and replenished the earth with her worn-out body, able no longer to be fruitful and multiply at the rate John Wesley thought necessary in order to fulfil the Holy Scriptures.

All that summer I attended an old man dying of Bright’s disease, prescribing for him and helping his over-burdened wife in nursing him. It was hard work—those bed-sores, his extreme emaciation and helplessness; but I then learned the luxury of feeling myself really useful. I knew I was helping to lighten burdens growing well-nigh unendurable. Yet how critical I was in my heart of the poor wife when, the morning I went there early and found her carrying out blankets and pillows to air, I heard her announce, with a relief in which there was no attempt at concealment, “Well, he’s gone at last!” She let me do the autopsy. I invited Belle and Dr. Campbell. I can remember the appearance of those worn-out kidneys far better than the details of many a later autopsy.

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CHAPTER X The “Medic”—Concluded

There were four hospital appointments of one year each open to the seniors, each student receiving board and laundry, and giving in return his or her services, except when attending lectures. I had already declined a position as house-physician at Lasell Seminary, to which one of the retiring seniors had recommended me, hoping to secure the next hospital vacancy on January first, though letting go the bird in the hand with considerable hesitation. Either position would be a great help financially, but the one at the hospital, if I could obtain it, would offer exceptional advantages from a medical point of view; besides would hold over six months after graduation.

We three applicants were in turn called before the Faculty and questioned as to our past life and experience, our standing in college, and our dispensary work. Not having thought to supply myself with letters of recommendation, I was not a little disturbed when the other girls showed me theirs. My turn came last, and I was considerably awed on entering the room where the professors were congregated, even though the dear Dean, and Dr. “Conrad,” and the friendly professor in materia medica were among the number. My work in the Post Office, and my two terms of country school-teaching were all I could think of when they asked me what I had to offer in the way of experience as to fitness for the position.

Our humorous little chest professor, Dr. C——, could not resist a joke at my expense:

“I see your standing in anatomy is 100 plus 1—ahem!—ah—just explain to me, won’t you, what this means? Does it mean that you know one more thing than Dr. Matson knows about anatomy—or one more thing than there is to know?”

I snickered at this, but quickly sobered and explained about the plus marks in quizzes counting on our final marks; and, his eyes twinkling, he professed his curiosity satisfied. Then some of the others put their queries, and finally they let me go.

In the adjoining room we three sat in suspense while they talked us over, each of us dreading yet hoping to be the lucky one. Presently Dr. C—— came to us, no pleasantry now; he looked really uncomfortable; fidgeting at his collar and cuffs, and glancing from one to the other of us, he said apologetically that they were sorry there were not three positions vacant, so as to give us all a chance to demonstrate our ability, but—hm! hm!—since there was only one, they had decided in favour of—ah—Miss Arnold.

I felt almost guilty at being chosen, but the other girls were very comforting, and the welcome the house-staff gave me, when I went downstairs, was cheering indeed. It was a great load off my mind—no more board to pay, to say nothing of other advantages. While the house-staff were questioning me as to the “grilling” I had received, the faculty meeting having dispersed, some of the professors dropped in the office. Dr. S——, in a charmingly facetious way, told the house officers why he voted for “Dr.” Arnold (with a low bow to me as he said that the title I was to earn next June was now mine by courtesy)—he had voted for her, he said, because she once brought him a “novel” patient from a prominent old school physician—no less a person than Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes! Another spoke in a more serious vein—my work in the Post Office he thought ought to have helped me to learn adaptability; but the irrepressible little Dr. C—— said he had chosen me because even Dr. Matson was willing to concede that I was more than perfect in anatomy.

Valuable as was the year in the hospital, I got all too little out of it, considering what it offered. The daily association with trained physicians and surgeons, and familiarity with illness, with hospital methods, with surgical technique, were among the unquestioned benefits.

The three of us who were undergraduates had to work particularly hard, as there was the college work to keep up, as well as the exacting demands of ward and operating-room work.

Though on the medical side for the first six months, I had the anesthetizing to do for a time. It was disagreeable work. Often all would go well and, interest centring on the operation, no one would notice the humble etherizer. Again, though I was seemingly just as painstaking, the patient would become cyanotic, and I would have to remove the cone, pull out the tongue, and perhaps resort to other measures to reëstablish respiration. If the operator noticed this, I would get very nervous, especially if it happened when a certain irascible surgeon was operating; for, impatient of the slightest delay, he would scold before the whole class. If I anesthetized so lightly that the patient moved, or—horror of horrors!—if he began retching, how mortified I was! And if I made the opposite mistake of pushing the ether too far—the agony I suffered, even after he was out of danger! to think how near he came to death through my incompetency! It all came easier after a while, but I was distinctly relieved when, after three months, I was graduated from the ether-cone, and promoted to “running instruments,” though there were trials even here.

So many surgeons, each with his different methods—it was no easy task for a beginner who knew little about the technique of operations, and had no special aptitude for anticipating just what instruments were needed and when. I think I never made a specially good assistant. I was not mechanical enough myself; but it was a pleasure to attend some of the surgeons—those who were cool and collected; who remembered our inexperience; who explained ahead their probable procedures, and called out clearly the name of the instrument they wished, if we did not anticipate them.

One of the operators, though skilled, was so nervous he would fairly jump up and down if one handed him a pair of forceps when he was not ready for them, or gave him the wrong retractor, or if the cat-gut broke when tying off arteries. Original in his methods, still he expected one to know what he wanted, no matter what, in his confusion, he said. He would throw a knife across the room if it was not sharp enough, or was not just to his fancy; and how he would scold and abuse us at times!—seldom at private operations when just the house-staff was present, but on clinic days when the entire student-body was assembled and also visiting physicians—at such times he was especially nervous and would make the fur fly.

“Can’t you tell what I want before I want it?—never did see such stupid assistants.” “Who sharpened these knives?” “Who prepared this cat-gut?” “Can’t you keep your patient under ether—have I got to operate and etherize, too?”

How furious we used to get! We were all in the same boat, though I am sure I was more stupid than the others, especially when he was concerned. But he would come around afterwards, while we were washing up instruments (and at the same time resolving that we were fools to stay on there and take his abuse), and by a few words he would, as it were, pat us all on the back; say we had helped him out of a very trying operation; that he never meant what he said when operating, and so on. And, so potent was his penitent manner, we were usually mollified—till the next time. As an operator we respected him; his cases always did well. We knew he was hot-headed, and that afterwards he was always ashamed of his temper; we also knew that others had lived through just such experiences, and that other students stood ready to take our positions if we abandoned them.

Serious were the daily events by which we were surrounded, but the irrepressibility of youth asserted itself. Mingled with the memory of solemn scenes and grave responsibilities are recollections of many a jolly hour within the hospital walls. I recall in this connection the initiation that our colleagues, Fenton and Laidlaw, gave me shortly after I went there. I roomed with Dr. Thorndike who had gone on the house-staff three months before. One night shortly after we had gone to bed we suddenly smelled amyl nitrite so strong that we got up to investigate. All was quiet in the hall and in the private rooms near by—the odour was clearly more penetrating right there in our room. After considerable search we found a tiny moist streak on the floor—those young doctors had injected a hypodermic syringeful of that pungent drug through our key-hole! We turned out our light and went back to bed, chagrined that, lurking about somewhere, they had doubtless heard us and known that we had risen to their bait. Soon we heard stealthy steps outside in the hall, then a squirt and a splash, and through the key-hole came a bigger stream—this time they had used a large syringe and injected strong ammonia. Of course we were forced to vacate and air our room—just what the besiegers wanted! They, and we, got all the more fun out of these practical jokes because we could not risk disturbing the patients, and also had to be guarded lest the wary matron, or the night nurses, discover our pranks. We were not above the pranks, but did not wish to impair our prestige as house-officers.

One evening Laidlaw, looking sober as a deacon, came to the office and requested us to repair to an upper room for consultation. He looked so dignified we knew something was up. Closing the door upon us, and solemnly unbuttoning his coat, he revealed a fat mince pie. After we had discussed it to the last crumb, and I had voted it the best pie I ever ate, he informed me it was a brandied pie. In those days I refused pies or sauces if I knew they contained brandy or sherry. Having wheedled the cook to put a double dose in that pie, he and the others chuckled to see the little teetotaller partake of it so greedily. At that time I was gullible, fairly docile, and must have been rare sport for the more sophisticated three. The young men lectured me in a fatherly way, and really did me a good service in getting me over some of my unduly prim ways. The first college year I had been so “proper” I would not let my father see me in my “gym” suit; yet before the year was over Miss Thorndike and I, to shock Miss Wilkins, had had our tin-types taken in those suits! One morning at the breakfast table, at the hospital, I was shocked to find a pencil sketch of two young women gymnasts, a rough sketch which implied that the one who made it must have seen this tin-type. Knowing it to be the work of Fenton and Laidlaw, I was distressed to think they must have seen the original; but was greatly relieved to find that Dr. Thorndike and a girl friend had simply described it minutely to them, so they could make me think they had seen it. After that Miss Thorndike’s friend, seeing how I was given to straining at gnats and swallowing camels, made a clever sketch of a prim maiden sitting in a large chair, the arms and legs of which were covered with gloves and stockings, while a statue of Venus (draped) stood near, and the maiden, holding a fan between her face and the draped statue, was absorbed in a book of Zola’s! Though I had never read a word of Zola’s I saw what a clever hit this was at my inconsistencies. Still I did not consider myself prudish; I could discuss medical topics freely with any one without embarrassment; but did not like jesting about certain matters; and perhaps, when in dead earnest, was rather slow in seeing the funny side of things. So the others claimed I needed some shocking and disciplining to get me over my squeamishness, and perhaps I did. I remember how Fenton scolded me one day for objecting when he started to brush the lint from my gown: “There’s no sense in your being so prim—I don’t want you to be as free and easy as Miss —— is, but you certainly do carry modesty too far.” He was so fine and honest, I know I profited by that and other advice of his.

We sometimes read aloud together in the evening, oftenest from “Pickwick Papers,” having uproarious times there in the office, with no patients or nurses near. One evening, when Dr. Thorndike was away, Laidlaw brought in a book saying, “I’ve found a brand new author—they say it’s great—let’s try it.” It was Amélie Rives’s “The Quick or the Dead.” We began it gaily and innocently, at least I did, reading aloud by turns. From the start it was very fervid, and soon I, and I think the young men also, began to be embarrassed. Just as I was feeling uneasy and wondering how I was going to get out of it, a bright little woman physician whom we all knew, passing the office door and hearing our gales of laughter (for we were making all sorts of fun of it to relieve our embarrassment) stopped and asked what we were reading. She looked surprised on being told, but made no comment about it, and as she turned to go, asked casually if she could speak with me later, when I was at liberty. Glad of an excuse, I said I could stop then, and went with her. Telling me that she had read the book, she said she thought I would find it quite impossible to go on with it with the young men, and suggested, as a way out, that I slip down to the office after they had gone to their rooms, get the book and read it, then tell them I had already finished it; they would then, she said, read it by themselves, and soon drop the subject.

That night I did as she advised. They grumbled and rallied me about being so eager that I couldn’t wait to finish it with them; but they soon let the subject rest. For years I blushed whenever I heard that book mentioned. It is the only book I ever read that I feel ashamed to admit having read, though now I have only the faintest recollection what it was all about.

Our hospital life was a full one—much work and many emotions crowded in the days: patients coming to be operated; many operations meaning life or death, and even the less serious ones always approached by the patients with dread and apprehension. It fell to the house-officers to receive and reassure patients and their friends; to calm their anxiety; to inspire their confidence in the operators, and their hope for the outcome. Sometimes the apprehension of the patient, and his forebodings, so weighed me down, that I found it difficult to be very reassuring; but I learned in time to disregard these, and was then, of course, of more help to the patients.

I recall one case in which the surgeon found such complications that there was nothing to do but bring the operation to a close, with the hope that the patient could rally from the anesthetic and have some minutes with her friends before the end. As she sank steadily, with what breathless but orderly haste we worked! That drawn, tense look on the surgeon’s face, the awful stillness in the operating room! Actuated by one motive, the assistants were so many extra hands for the surgeon, anticipating his needs to the letter. Restoratives were applied, every conceivable means was employed to counteract the collapse into which the patient was sinking. Giving his entire attention to the field of operation, and working with marvellous rapidity, the surgeon was taking the last stitches, when we told him she was gone. Nervelessly he dropped his hands, leaving Laidlaw and me to finish the stitches and apply the dressings. The look of agony on the face he lifted to us was a revelation. I had never realized till then what the taking of such a serious case means to a surgeon, and was more especially impressed as I had thought this particular surgeon cold and self-centred. A few minutes later he came to me, his voice shaking, and asked if, as a special favour to him, I would go down and speak with the friends, and tell them carefully about the outcome. Not an easy thing to do, but I felt so much compassion for him I would not have hesitated had it been twice as hard. Sometimes our patients were poor and obscure; again, as in the above case, from well-known Boston families—the extremes of life met in that little hospital of about one hundred beds, and scenes grave and gay alternated in rapid succession.

One day a big demonstrative fellow under etherization caused me no end of embarrassment: It was an emergency case sandwiched in between others, and they brought him in the operating room only partly anesthetized. It was a day when the room was full of students. I was busy, passing back and forth, getting things ready, when in the maudlin loquacity of that first-stage of ether he threw out his arms and begged me to come and hold his hand. They tried to quiet him, and to push the ether, but he took it poorly and resisted vigorously, and kept addressing to me many endearing epithets as he entreated me to come and hold his hand. Of course the students enjoyed it, and suppressed titters passed along the rows of spectators. My face reddened furiously. I tried to keep out of sight as much as possible, but with the persistence of one partly under ether, he kept calling, “Let her come and hold my hand—let the little angel hold my hand.”

The students were highly amused, and even the surgeon, who ordinarily never betrayed amusement in the amphitheatre, showed a suspicious twitching about the mouth, and finally, the entreaties continuing, said to me, “Dr. Arnold, I think perhaps it will quiet him if you do as he requests.” There was nothing to do but comply. I had to step up to the table and hold the big baby’s hand, to the delight of the students—especially to one Breynton, one of the house-staff over at the Dispensary, who, having been a victim of some of my practical jokes, rejoiced at my discomfiture.

When Fenton’s term of service ended, and he went to practise in a neighbouring city, he left the rest of us disconsolate. We four had had such good times together. He was a fine, manly fellow, very kind to the patients, conscientious, impatient of pretense—it was he who had lectured me about my prudishness. He had a keen sense of humour and a fine sense of honour; and the friendship begun in those hospital days has been one of the most satisfactory in my life—a real camaraderie. We did not take so kindly to his successor, Dr. James—a genial but presuming youth, harder to keep in place, more daring, more flirtatious. It wasn’t long before James was teaching me to dance in the amphitheatre, after we would get the instruments put away, he whistling the music. I soon saw that that would not do. But we often played and sang together; he had a fine tenor voice. Dr. Thorndike’s term expiring shortly after she took her degree, and no one applying through that summer, there were then but three of us to do the work previously shared by four.

Our Commencement was held in Tremont Temple, the whole University participating—an immense affair, very impersonal, it meant far less to me than our modest little Commencement of Academy days. Coming, too, in the midst of hospital work, it was but an event in the day. Still, I remember a thrill, as of something achieved, when, filing across the platform with hundreds of other students, I received my diploma from President Warren. Each department of the University sat in a body; each student stepped upon the big platform as his name was called out; his diploma was handed him; and the generous applause from his own student-body sounded very good, as (if a “medic”) he walked down the steps on the other side, a full-fledged M.D. Most of the graduates were immediately confronted by the vexed question of where to “locate,” but those of us in the hospital had six months’ grace before that bugbear stared us in the face.

My thesis, on “Heredity,” consisted mainly of quotations from authorities I had consulted in the Public Library. The original matter in it, feeble and inadequate, was chiefly a protest against the marriage of the unfit. I was ardently espousing the cause of Eugenics before there was such a cause, or at least before Galton’s seed-sowing had found a friendly soil. There was an unscientific portion about pre-natal influence, and plenty of advice to prospective parents as to the need of influencing the unborn, so as to make them beautiful of body and soul. There is nothing, I am convinced, that the Young Person hesitates to advise humanity about just as he himself is about to take his plunge into the sea of life. Slumbering somewhere in the dusty archives of Boston University is my lengthy thesis on Heredity—slumbering? but a thing has to live to slumber—this offspring of mine never had any life—it was still-born.

Shortly after Commencement I went to W—— to visit a former class-mate, and also to see Dr. Fenton who had “located” there. He had called at Dr. Carson’s on my arrival, and it was agreed that she and I would go to see him the next day in his new office.

That afternoon it popped into my head to dress up as an old woman and make him think for a moment that he had a new patient. Combing my hair down over my ears, putting on spectacles, and a black gown, bonnet, and veil, I looked very like a little elderly widow. Dr. Carson waited at a near-by drug-store. The lame woman in black hobbled up the steps to the young doctor’s office. His door was ajar. (He was expecting Dr. Carson and me.) I purposely halted as he came toward me, that he might take in my general appearance before I spoke, the better to aid the disguise.

He looked, I thought, a bit disappointed not to see his friends, but the look gave place to one of quiet attention, and even a gleam of pleasure at acquiring a new patient. I saw as he invited me to be seated that he had no suspicion of me, and consequently, could scarcely articulate for laughter. Not having expected to deceive him, except for an instant, I had not thought up a story, but, suppressing my giggles, and assuming the Irish brogue, I began a story about my sick daughter.

His questions, so to the point, so professional, so serious, nearly convulsed me, but turning my suppressed laughter into pretended crying, to gain time to concoct a story, I claimed to be too distressed to talk about what was troubling me.

The Doctor gravely offered me a fan, which act, together with his guarded manner, started my risibilities afresh. He showed clearly that he was annoyed at this queer person, but was doing his best to be patient with her. I had gone so far, it was imperative to invent some story to account for my distress, and to my own surprise I told him, with many haltings and outbursts of grief, that my daughter, though unmarried, was, I feared, “in trouble”; and I had come to him for help. (This from Miss Prim who, a few months before, would not let this young man brush the lint from her gown!) Would he come to see the girl? And my tears and sighs broke forth afresh.

He looked grave and sympathetic, yet somewhat suspicious. As his questions became more searching, I was consumed with shame at the thought of how I should feel when he knew the truth. But I was in for it. I was a strange-acting old mother with my aborted giggles transformed to sobs and sighs. He grew more suspicious, saying, at length: “I think you will be more comfortable, and can talk more easily, if you remove your veil.”

Then I was scared. Perhaps he recognized me; perhaps he had all along; but now, disgusted at the lengths I had gone, was taking this way to punish me. Still, so long as he kept up the pretense, I would not throw up the game. But from that time on I was decidedly uncomfortable and every answer I made, was made with the double feeling: Perhaps he knows, and is getting even with me; and, If he doesn’t know, this is a tremendous success.

As his inquiries progressed, I was heartily ashamed at the answers and details I was forced to submit to keep in character. This continuing, I grew hysterical in earnest, acting more and more extravagantly, while his suspicions were more and more aroused, or his anger—I could not tell which. He grew very stern. Sitting back in his chair, he said decidedly, “I shall discuss this no further with you until you remove your veil.”

I would have given anything then to get away. I felt sure he knew me. That veil had got to come off. Delaying, I fumbled with it, dreading to meet his eyes when my own were uncovered. As I cried and fumbled, my hands trembling in earnest, the veil caught in the trimmings, and he got up to help me. His face was softening, he looked sympathetic again. Then he didn’t know me after all? or, was he carrying the sorry jest as far as he could? The veil at last removed, I looked up in his face—afraid of him, and ready to cry at what I had done. We gazed at each other for an instant, and then—I saw such a look of astonishment as I have seldom seen—he had not suspected me at all!

He was so overwhelmed with mortification that my own mortification vanished, and I confessed that I had been on pins and needles most of the time, fearing it was he who was getting the joke on me. What gales of laughter went up from that office! We had such a hilarious time we almost forgot to summon Dr. Carson who was impatiently waiting outside.

Dr. Fenton made me promise to try the same trick on Dr. James, the new interne, on my return to the hospital. He did not dream of asking me to keep it from Laidlaw; he declared they would have to admit that I had wiped out all our old scores. And when I told the story to Laidlaw, how delighted he was! though he could hardly credit that Fenton, knowing me so well, could have been so long deceived.

“How could he—your voice, your hands, your eyes, even with veil and spectacles—incredible!” Yet he revelled in it—that demure, prudish “Little Arnold” would do such a thing. “You! You!—we thought we knew Little Arnold, but we didn’t.”

He was tickled at Fenton’s suggestion that I try the thing on James, and eager for me to start at once, begging me to let him be near to see the fun. But I only half promised, fearing I could not carry it through if any one in the secret were about.

One night when I knew he and James were to be in the office, telling them I expected to be occupied most of the evening, so would not myself be down as usual, I borrowed some toggery from a patient, and arrayed myself in my widow’s garb; and, slipping out by a side door, came in just before dusk at the front gate, hobbling across the lawn and up to the hospital in plain sight of the young doctors sitting in the office window.

College and Hospital are in the same enclosure, and outdoor Dispensary patients were expected to be taken care of over at the College; we of the hospital-staff, being supposed to refer all cases applying there to the Dispensary department. But knowing that James was eager for obstetric work, and that he would be likely to snap up any he could, I hoped by my tale to get him out as far as the street with me (to attend my daughter in confinement) before he should discover my identity.

Jack, the bell-boy, came to the door: Might I see the house-doctor? “Which one?” he asked—“the medical or the surgical doctor?” If Laidlaw, who was the surgical interne, came, I should be undone; he would know me, and I could not keep in character with him looking on; so I said, “Oh, the medical—don’t say anything to any one but him.”

The boy lit the gas in the waiting room and went for Dr. James. I quickly turned it low.

James came, curious and important. Using the Irish brogue and the expressions used by Dispensary patients, I explained that my daughter was in labour and that I wanted him to hurry as fast as ever he could to save her life. He was not at all suspicious. But not yet having had an obstetric case, and learning that it was a primipara (first birth), he anticipated trouble, and was averse to tackling it alone. I knew of what he was thinking, so feigning impatience, related symptoms which would impress him with the need of haste. Would he come, or not? Yes, he would come, but he must take the house-surgeon also, as he might need assistance with instruments.

Fearing the game would be up if Laidlaw appeared on the scene, I protested vehemently: I would have no one else; one doctor was enough; my daughter’s condition should not be known to everybody—that was why I had come here instead of going to the “Dispensatory”; I was no pauper, and would pay him well, if he would come alone. He wavered, then excused himself for a moment. I could hear him and Laidlaw in the office discussing it. Finally Laidlaw said, “Tell her it is customary—that you won’t undertake it under other conditions.”

I was annoyed at Laidlaw for making it more difficult for me. James came back, conciliatory and persuasive: it was liable to be a serious case; my daughter was young; he must take help with him; it would cost no more than for one, and the utmost secrecy would be preserved; the house-surgeon would go with him and assist if need be, otherwise he must decline the case.

I said to myself, “It is mean of Laidlaw when he knew I wanted to do it alone. But he’s bound to see me in the act, and I guess I can keep a stiff upper lip if he can.” By that time, too, I was fairly confident. “Let him come, then,” I said, “but hurry.”

They soon came with their obstetric bags, James excited and flurried, Laidlaw quiet and dignified. He gave me a curt “Good evening”; and, with directions to Jack to ask Dr. Arnold to come down to the office, as he and Dr. James had been called out, we three went down the steps, I hobbling and stooping, but hurrying along between them. At first I was a little more self-conscious with Laidlaw along, but by the time we had gone a few steps, instead of being longer provoked at him for coming, I was glad; it was such fun to be sharing it with him; his acting was perfect; he was cool and self-controlled, and James was so unsuspecting!

Laidlaw asked me a few of the usual questions. Answering in character, I looked slyly out of the corner of my eye, expecting him to exchange surreptitious glances with me occasionally, but he looked straight ahead, sober as a deacon, probably afraid of disconcerting me. Presently he put other questions, and still no betrayal of anything but the apparent situation. Suddenly it dawned upon me that neither he nor James knew me! Then I was set up! This was a triumph I could never have dreamed of—since he had heard the story of the trick played upon Fenton, and knew I intended trying it on James, too! It was incredible, but I soon saw, beyond doubt, that he was as completely taken in (or out) as was James. I had said to myself: “If I can only get James out on the street a way with his bag, it will be all I will ask.” And here I had them both!

In the course of the walk I promised them five dollars apiece for their services, if they would bring my daughter safely through. After walking a few blocks, I began to be anxious, as there was now no one at the hospital to attend to emergencies. They, of course, thought I was there. I must bring this to a close speedily.

Assuming an hysterical manner, so as to draw their attention more closely to me, and thus bring about the disclosure, I even took off my veil, walking in the glare of the street lamps—all to no purpose; the more I tried to reveal myself, the more I concealed myself; they only tried to hush my noisy grief and to pacify me. Once Laidlaw helped me to adjust my bonnet, which I nearly knocked off, purposely, by my wild jostling against them, but all in vain—the wilder my conduct, the better my disguise. We were now several blocks away from the hospital. I saw I must terminate it some other way.

Walking up some steps of a darkened house, I pretended to fumble for my keys, and, waiting till they had followed so close that their faces were on a level with mine, I turned, and in my own voice said, “Haven’t we carried this far enough?”

James, to whom my other masquerade was unknown, was dazed, he ran down the steps, leaned against the house, and stood there speechless, his face hid in his hands. Laidlaw—took me in his arms; he could seem to find no other mode of expression. Tired from the walk, and the heat, and weak from laughter, I found it a comfortable position—but was too intent on flying back to the hospital to stay in it long.

Dignified and unemotional as Laidlaw was, he let himself go that night; his manner was charming. I basked in his generous praise as I imagine an actor basks in the applause of his audience:

“You’re a revelation, you’re an actress, you are wonderful! Why, Little Arnold, is it really you? Oh, James! James! you don’t know what she’s done—you don’t know half of it!”

And as we hurried home, they half-carrying me between them, the young doctors and the crazy-acting little widow traversed the Boston streets, hilarious over the whole proceeding. Laidlaw explained to James what a signal triumph it was, in that he had not only known of the joke on Fenton, but also knew that I intended trying a similar one on him. This appeased James’s chagrin somewhat, still he was badly cut up over it; but Laidlaw magnanimously gave me all the credit imaginable, fairly rejoicing in having been so duped by me. As we neared the hospital, however, it dawned upon both of them what laughing-stocks they would be when the thing was noised around, especially when Breynton and Hummel, of the Dispensary-staff, learned of it; so nothing would do but that I should try the same scheme on them. They assured me I could do it easily, even with them looking on; and as they would let Jack know that they were back and within call, I need have no compunctions. So, dropping behind, while they sauntered up to the College steps where Breynton and Hummel sat smoking and complaining of the hot night, I soon came hobbling up to the group. And Laidlaw and James soon had the satisfaction of seeing Breynton and Hummel walk off with the little widow—and in the course of an hour, walk back again, chagrined beyond words, but somewhat mollified when they learned that their colleagues had also been victimized in the same way. Each man rejoiced that the others were in the same box. The double, yes, triple, hoax, served for conversation for many a week. If one would instance some proof of the density of the others, he would soon be silenced by fresh proofs of his own asininity. “It was a famous victory” was their ever-generous verdict, and it only cemented the camaraderie among us.

As the time approached for Laidlaw’s term to expire I began to be wretched, at first hardly realizing, much less acknowledging to myself, that it was because he was leaving. I was even less friendly, less responsive, and, as the time drew near, more inclined to stay in my room than usual. Dr. Reynolds, a keen little woman who was much about the hospital in those days, suspected the cause of my glumness. One evening as she was calling on me and rallying me on moping in my room alone instead of staying down in the office, a knock on my door arrested her banter.

“Who’s there?” I called.

The door opened a crack, and Laidlaw’s voice announced, “I’m here—you are wanted down in the office.”

“Who wants me?”

“I want you,” and with that he pushed open the door, and to his confusion (and mine) encountered Dr. Reynolds’s merry, mischievous eyes, the occurrence, of course, only serving to confirm her in her belief that there was something more than good-fellowship between us. Laidlaw and James often rang my bell of an evening, summoning me to the office, when it was only they who wanted me. They knew that I never dared disregard it, for fear it might be a call to the wards; once down there, I was usually easily persuaded to stay.

That night after Dr. Reynolds left, I went down, but when reading aloud was proposed, did not fall in with the proposition—the good times we had all had together were so soon to end—I was in no mood for reading aloud. We sat near each other, each busy with his own book, or pretending to be. Later, having dropped my book, I was looking out of the window, fearing Laidlaw would see my tell-tale face, when, presently, taking me by the shoulder, he gently turned me round facing him:

“What are you doing, Little Arnold?”

“Thinking.”

“Don’t think.” It was all he said, but his tone, and my silence, were tacit acknowledgment—we understood each other better then, and after that he did not chide me, as he had before, for not caring that he was so soon to go away.

Those last days of his stay were very hard, and when the day came when he assisted at operations for the last time, and we were clearing up afterward as usual, we laughed a sort of hollow laughter, laughed at anything and everything; at the awkwardness of the stuttering little student, his successor—we tried to find funny things to talk about—anything so long as we kept away from what was uppermost in our minds, and allowed no silences.

When Laidlaw left, James was away on his vacation, and a likeable little German student, who was acting as substitute, was very acceptable to both of us, we three being very congenial. When Laidlaw put out his hand to the German to bid him farewell, he attempted to be jocose, but failed sadly; then,

“Take good care of Little Arnold, Old Boy,” he said, and, turning to me, drew me to him and would have kissed me; but, fond as I was of him, I couldn’t do that. He looked pained. By this time I could no longer control my tears; this surprised and perplexed him:

“Why, why, why—Little Arnold, why, you do care!” and standing dumb for an instant, he wrung my hand and went slowly out and down the steps; and I—I felt I had lost my last friend.

I had to give way and weep in spite of the presence of the little German. He was very good to me then, and always. I think he then thought that it was a more serious attachment than it was; he chided me for not bidding Laidlaw a more affectionate farewell—could not seem to understand why I did not, since I cared so much about his going. That evening, picking up a copy of Emerson’s essays I had been reading, and seeing it was the essay on Friendship, with a searching look he asked, “And is it only friendship that I see between you and Laidlaw?” When I stoutly maintained that it was, he seemed half credulous, half doubtful, but in his naïve foreign way said appealingly, “Then, Little Racker, be my friend, too.” And we were warm friends after that.

In a few days came Laidlaw’s first letter; it gave me a thrill of joy, but I am bound to confess that even before it came (after the acuteness of the grief was over) I had grown surprisingly cheerful, so much so that I was ashamed of myself for not continuing to feel as wretched as when he went away. I reproached myself, but all to no purpose. Every day brought its duties; added responsibilities now fell on me; the new interne had to be taught “the ropes”; and, while I missed my good friend at every turn, I could not mope and pine. But I could not understand myself—how such wretchedness, such utter wretchedness, could be so short-lived!

A few weeks before my own term of service expired I had a hard time with septic infection—a serious inflammation in my thumb, probably contracted while assisting at an operation. I was tired out, and the thing took a severe hold on me. They temporized for a time, but finally decided I must take an anesthetic and have the nail removed and the deeper tissues thoroughly cleansed. As we were short-handed at the Hospital, I dragged around when I should have been in bed.

I shall not soon forget the feeling I had on learning that I had actually to surrender myself to an anesthetic, to submit voluntarily to that which would rob me of consciousness. It was horrible to contemplate. It seemed such a momentous thing—not the operation, of course, but the taking of chloroform. I wrote a letter home the night before, to be posted in case I did not survive. One would have thought my year in the hospital would have made me more callous to such things. I myself can hardly understand why it was so painful to me to face this experience—just like any other patient. Somehow, I had always felt outside of such things, a mere spectator, though considering myself a sympathetic one. But, until then, I had not dreamed what dread consumed the souls of the patients whom I had so lightly encouraged to submit to the inevitable.

Extracting a promise from “Polly,” the nurse, that if I showed any tendency to loquacity she would send everyone from the room, and would remember to tell me all I said, I braced for the ordeal. That morning, omitting breakfast, visiting my patients as usual, I put up prescriptions, and helped prepare the amphitheatre for an operation that was to precede mine. Then, looking in on the young patient before he went to the anesthetizing room, I told him I was going to give the surgeon a chance at me after his operation. He said afterward that my cheery way of speaking made him ashamed of his trepidation, so that he went to his operation with more courage than he had believed himself capable of. He little knew how I quaked internally—it was awful—that thought of having the chloroform steal away my senses!

After helping with that case, I slipped off to my room to get ready, expecting to return to the amphitheatre for my own operation; but, while I was undressing, “Polly” rushed in to say that Dr. Paxton would operate in my own room. This was a relief. Soon they came: Higginson, the new house-doctor, carrying the tray with instruments and dressings, James with the chloroform and the inhaler, and Dr. Paxton in his operating gown.

Lying down on my little white bed, with an outward semblance of composure, I inhaled the chloroform. The surgeon listened to my heart, and, after assuring me it was all right, began himself to give me the anesthetic. The first few breaths were not so bad; then I felt the stuff insidiously stealing through me. “Ah! how sweet it is,” I remember saying—a peculiar, sickish sweetness that I can never smell now without recalling the scene and my growing terror of the drug as its effects crept through me, faster and faster, and I impotent to stay its power. I remember noting and analyzing my sensations as it progressed; remember the feeling of confidence in Dr. Paxton’s assurance that it was all right; then I opened my eyes and saw James bending over me. He had the inhaler now, and was looking at me with such a pitying gaze that I felt sorry for myself, and told myself I must be careful or I should whimper, which would be disgraceful. Still it kept stealing on, and yet I knew what they were all doing. I heard preparations; heard the new doctor stutter as he tried to ask about something, getting so tangled up that it made me want to laugh, but reminded myself I must not. It was all so curious—to be able to think these things and yet to feel this creeping, creeping up slowly, surely. Ah, now I am almost gone—an instant of rebellion—it must not be, I cannot succumb; but, following quickly, came the realization that it must be, and that I must not struggle. Once more I opened my eyes and looked at them all—poor “Polly”! the tears were streaming down her cheeks; and James looked wretchedly unhappy. I knew that in another moment I should be beyond recognizing anything. They said I gave a low, piteous cry (I seem to remember even this), and said, “I’m going now—watch my pulse!” Even then I felt Dr. Paxton take my wrist, and assure me in a voice that sounded very far away, “It’s all right, Doctor, all right!”

The next I knew I found myself in my bed with my head turned in the opposite direction. “Polly” was moving quietly about the room; and by my side sat Dr. James holding my hand, and smoothing my arm in a kindly way. Scarcely a trace was left in the room of what had taken place there. A feeling of incredulity, almost of indignation—had nothing been done to my thumb, then, after going through with all that! I started to ask why they had not done it, but seeing my bandaged hand, and simultaneously becoming conscious of a newer sharper pain than I had ever felt, I had to believe that it was all over; but how could it be, and I not know it! Then I began laughing! I started to chide “Polly” for letting James stay in the room; but could not do so for laughter. James tried to pacify me, talking as though I were a sick child—the same way I had talked to ether patients. The oddity of this coming over me, I said, “I’m just like any other silly patient,” then laughed afresh; and the more I laughed, the less self-restraint I had. But, impressed with the necessity of assuring them that I knew what I was about, I said: “I know what I am saying, and why you are laughing, but I don’t care—I know who you are, you are Dr. James, and you’re holding my hand, and I don’t care if you do,” and I laughed in reckless abandon. “Polly” was distressed; she knew I would be angry later. James looked delighted. “Do you like it?” he asked—the rogue! “Yes, I like it—it feels so big and strong.” How he shouted! That shout sobered me. In no time I was completely myself—no more aware than before, but with the Censor at the helm.

After that James used to try to squeeze my hand, reminding me that it was my real self that had spoken then—in wine (and chloroform) one speaks the truth.

Shortly after that two fingers on my left hand became infected, and again I had to be lightly anesthetized and operated. By that time I was so much run down they kept me in bed for days, taking excellent care of me—a rather delightful experience. The visiting physicians and surgeons called; the nurses were more than attentive; the Dispensary house-staff came over and read to me, and groaned to think they had been debarred from my operations. Breynton said he would have liked nothing better than to have given “the little angel” the anesthetic; and James told him he would have been welcome to the job, but mischievously added that he was willing to watch me come out of the chloroform. It was much harder after that to keep James within bounds. One day when “Polly” had gone from the room a minute, he grabbed up my hair which lay across the pillow, and winding it around his neck, buried his face in it for an instant. Astonished and angered, I felt wronged and insulted. Half-contritely, half-teasingly, he tried to laugh me out of my wrath, and “Polly” coming in just then, I was obliged to act as though nothing had happened. On his good behaviour after that, he never transgressed so seriously again. I could never think of that impulsive act of his without my cheeks burning with shame.

My own time soon came to leave the hospital. The night before, I went over to the College, went in each empty room, lingered in the halls, and even down in the stuffy Dispensary quarters. I thought of all that had happened during the time since Belle and I had first entered that building on that rainy October day, and wondered what changes would come before I should see the place again. Even then the girl who had entered College seemed a different person from the one who was leaving Boston on the morrow. In the same way I went about the hospital, loth to break with it all, and trying as it were to gather up the spent life I had lived there. It was with a queer kind of satisfaction to note that they all seemed sorry to see me go. I felt jealous of the new student, my successor; felt pained that I was no longer necessary; that the routine would soon continue as smoothly as ever. As the hour drew near I felt tenderly toward everyone—patients, nurses, the janitor, the bell-boy, even the opinionated English nurse, “Wraggie,” for whom I had no real liking.

As they all crowded around the door-way at my leave-taking, and the other house-doctors came over from the Dispensary, I saw regretfully that Breynton was not among them; the night before he had said he would surely see me again. But as the cab left the hospital grounds and I leaned out for a last look at the College, I saw Breynton signalling the cab-man to stop—he had stationed himself there at the entrance to say good-bye. It touched me to see his altered manner—instead of his jovial hectoring ways, a big brotherly fondness and regret showed in face and voice. A warm handclasp, then, as the horses started up, his wholesome smile shone out encouragingly, and he said in his old bantering way, “So this is the last of the ‘Little Angel’!”

The cab whirled me to the station, the same station where Belle and I had landed three and one half years before when we had come to this strange city—the city I was now leaving with such a store of memories! It had grown very clear, it always will be dear—my beloved Boston!

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