At the word “doctor” I looked at him more warmly, and I saw then what was plain enough to see but for the dim light of the little place,—the thin flush on the cheek, the hopeful mind, the contrast of the will to live and the need to die, God’s little irony on man, it was all there plain enough to read. The “spell” for which the little druggist was going is that which is written in letters of sorrow over the sunlit desolation of Arizona and the mountains of Colorado.
A month went by before I passed that way again. I looked across at the little store and I read the story in its drawn blinds and the padlock on its door.
The little druggist had gone away for a spell. And they told me, on enquiry, that his journey had been no further than to the cemetery behind the town where he lies now, musing, if he still can, on the law of the survival of the fittest in this well-adjusted world.
And they say that the shock of the addition of his whole business to the great Pharmacy across the way scarcely disturbed a soda siphon.
XVI—THE FIRST NEWSPAPER
A Sort of Allegory
How likes it you, Master Brenton?” said the brawny journeyman, spreading out the news sheet on a smooth oaken table where it lay under the light of a leaded window.
“A marvellous fair sheet,” murmured Brenton Caxton, seventh of the name, “let me but adjust my glasses and peruse it further lest haply there be still aught in it that smacks of error.”