house physician in The Strangers’ Hospital. When he wrote, toward the close of his life, a record of what his experiences had meant, he gave the book this dedication:
TO MY DEAR WIFE
EVER AT MY SIDE
EVER CHEERFUL AND HOPEFUL AND HELPFUL
THROUGH THESE LONG YEARS
DURING WHICH
“PLEASURE AND PAIN
HAVE FOLLOWED EACH OTHER
LIKE SUNSHINE AND RAIN.”
It was through his love for her, he said, that he was able to keep steadily at work during his college days, when close application to study and the confinement of city life were telling not only upon his health but also wearing away the inner soul that ever craved, with a deeper and more poignant longing, the freedom of open spaces and the breath of the life-giving woods.
It was a very different story from those light-hearted, familiar ones where “they married and lived happily ever after.” The rain followed the sunshine very soon after the young doctor had returned from his wedding-trip and settled down to practice in New York. After months of struggle against what he thought was a sort of stubborn malaria, together with the old rebellion against a shut-in life, the doctor who had worked so bravely to fit himself to cure others came face to face with the truth that he himself had a disease which no doctor could cure. The world seemed dark indeed when he thought he must soon leave his loved wife, the little Charlotte and baby Ned, and all that he had hoped to accomplish in the future.