So, in addition to my school work, I studied Gray’s Anatomy. He let me take home a box of bones, and I felt proud indeed to be learning about each little groove and facet and tuberosity. On Saturdays I recited and sometimes went with him into the country, often reading to him from books on materia medica or on pathology as we drove lazily along. Occasionally he took me into the houses to see an interesting case, but as a rule I held the lines during his visits (and was always nervous till he was back in the buggy). Once I went with him when he reduced a fractured arm. I got angry at the rough, coarse-voiced woman who stood by ridiculing her husband for his groans and sighs; she called him a calf, and said he ought to have a few babies, then he might make a fuss. The Doctor was much amused at my embarrassment.
My preceptor moved away before I was graduated from the Academy, and I then carried on what studying I did by myself, and later with another girl, who, though ridiculing me at first, finally decided to go to Boston with me to study medicine. No urging of mine influenced her; on the contrary, I was rather disappointed at her decision. Secretly pleased, as I was, to be different from the others, Belle’s determination to study medicine robbed me of this distinction. Then we had never been especially congenial. Totally unlike in tastes and temperament, we had always been on opposite sides of the fence—she a Democrat, I a Republican; she a Baptist, I a Methodist—we had quarrelled over politics and argued over religion, and there was no love lost between us. But, as she told me later, she had had me “dinged” into her ears by her mother and sister so long that she had come to think she must do as I did. This is why she decided to study medicine.
At our last rhetorical exercises before graduation, we had the usual history and prophecy, and felt the sentiments and emotions usually felt on leaving school. We resurrected an old song we had sung in the lower grades—“Twenty Years Ago”—its sentiment appealing to us now that we were already beginning to feel a yearning for the old place:
I’ve wandered to the village, Tom,
I’ve sat beneath the tree
Upon the school-house play-ground
Which sheltered you and me;
But none were left to greet me, Tom,
And few were left to know