No, I thought I would not stop. I didn’t stop till I reached the hotel, where I had begged the stage-driver to wait for me but a half hour before, while I called upon the lovely Miss Mary ——.
“O, sunny dreams of childhood,
How soon they pass away!
Like flowers within the wild wood,
They perish and decay.”
A handy Doctor.
A young physician was supposed to be “keepin’ company” with a young lady. The matronly friend of the latter, having praised the young man from all points of view, returned one day from the death-bed of a friend, at which the physician had been present. She eulogized the living fully as much as the dead man, and finally turning to the girl, as if she had reached the ne plus ultra of enthusiasm, she said, “Jane, he’s the handsomest man I ever see fixin’ round a corpse.”
A Doctor’s Story.
The writer is acquainted with a young physician, who read medicine with an old doctor, named Gitchel, or Twichel, of Portland, and commenced practice in his native village,—a great mistake for any practitioner to make,—and where he met with consequences natural to even a prophet, opposition and scandal. By some mistake, or, as his opponents charged, mal-practice, he lost a patient. Being, a few days later, in a shop in the next village, he was secretly informed that the “hounds of the law were after him—even at the next door, that very moment.” Terrified beyond necessity, he caught up his medicine chest, and, climbing out of the back window, fled to the woods. In the village, at home, he had courted a lovely young girl, with whom he had exchanged vows. She knew the talk that was going on respecting the young doctor, but she believed it not, or, believing, clung the firmer to her pledges.
FLIGHT OF THE DOCTOR.
“After night fell I left the woods, and took to the highway. To go home I was afraid. O, had I but braved the doctors, and defied the lawyers, all would have been well,” he told me afterwards. “But I had received such ill treatment, been scandalized so severely, that I was cowed to the earth. I knew not if my life, my Angie, had also turned against me, when the news was spread that I had tacitly admitted my crime by fleeing.
“I went to W., hundreds of miles away. I took a new name, and put out my shingle. I was at once patronized, and soon extensively; but I was morose and unhappy. I was offered a home and a wife. I had as good as a wife away in my far-off home; I was bound to her, and I loved her as I hated my own soul! I dared not write to her, nor go to her. ‘O, my God, what shall I do?’ I cried, in my misery. He did not hear me, and I came to believe that He was not!