It so happened that as Mr. Horace Barker and the Misses Barker descended the steps of the late Mr. Cherrington’s house, they came plump upon Mr. Homer Ramsay, who was taking his morning stroll. The old gentleman was standing leaning on his cane, glaring across the street; and, by way of acknowledging that he perceived his first cousin once removed, he raised the cane, and, pointing in the line of his scowling gaze, ejaculated:
“This street is going to perdition. As though it weren’t enough to have a school opposite me, a fellow has had the impudence to put his doctor’s sign right next door to my house—an oculist, he calls himself. In my day, a man who was fit to call himself a doctor could set a leg, or examine your eyes, or tell what was the matter with your throat, and not leave you so very much the wiser even then; but now there’s a different kind of quack for every ache and pain in our bodies.”
“We live in a progressive world, Cousin Homer,” said Mr. Barker, placing his eyeglass astride his nose to examine the obnoxious sign across the way. “Dr. James Clay, Oculist,” he read aloud, indifferently.
“Progressive fiddlesticks, Cousin Horace. A fig for your oculists and your dermatologists and all the rest of your specialists! I have managed to live to be seventy-five, and I never had anybody prescribe for me but a good old-fashioned doctor, thank Heaven! And I’m not dead yet, as the speculators who have their eyes on my house and are waiting for me to die will find out.” Mr. Ramsay scowled ferociously; then casting a sweeping glance from under his eyebrows at the little girls, he said, “Cousin Horace, if your children don’t have better health than their mother, they might as well be dead. Do they go there?” he asked, indicating the school-house with his cane.
“I am removing them this morning. Anabel had concluded to send them there, but I find that the young woman who is the teacher has such hoity-toity notions that I cannot consent to let my daughters remain with her. In my opinion, so arbitrary a young person should be checked; and my belief is that before many days she will find herself without pupils.” Whereupon Mr. Barker proceeded on his way, muttering to himself, when at a safe distance, “Irrational old idiot!”
Mr. Ramsay stood for some moments mulling over his cousin’s answer; by degrees his countenance brightened and he began to chuckle; and every now and then, in the course of his progress along Saville Street, he would stand and look back at the late Mr. Cherrington’s house, as though it had acquired a new interest in his eyes. His daily promenade was six times up and six times down Saville Street; and he happened to complete the last lap, so to speak, of his sixth time down at the very moment when Miss Whyte’s little girls came running out on the sidewalk for recess. Behind them appeared the school-mistress, who stood looking at her flock from the top of the stone flight.
Elizabeth knew the old gentleman by sight but not by name, and she was therefore considerably astonished to see him suddenly veer from his ordinary course, and come slowly up the steps.
“You’re the school-mistress?” he asked, with the directness of an old man who feels that he need not mince his words.
“Yes, sir. I’m Miss Whyte.”
“My name’s Ramsay; Homer Ramsay. I live opposite, and I’ve come to tell you I admire your pluck in not letting my cousin, Hortace Barker, put you down. I’ll stand by you, too; you can tell him that. Break up your school? I should like to see him do it. Had to take his three little girls away, did he? Ho, ho! A grand good joke that; a grand good joke. What was it he asked you to do?”