On the way home on the train he talked much of crude alcohol and the possibilities of its commercial manufacture.
So far as I know, his only benefaction up to date has been the two dollars that he gave to a hackman to drive us away from the college.
6.—Fetching the Doctor: From Recollections of Childhood in the Canadian Countryside
We lived far back in the country, such as it used to be in Canada, before the days of telephones and motor cars, with long lonely roads and snake fences buried in deep snow, and with cedar swamps where the sleighs could hardly pass two abreast. Here and there, on a winter night, one saw the light in a farm house, distant and dim.
Over it all was a great silence such as people who live in the cities can never know.
And on us, as on the other families of that lonely countryside, there sometimes fell the sudden alarm of illness, and the hurrying drive through the snow at night to fetch the doctor from the village, seven miles away.
My elder brother and I—there was a long tribe of us, as with all country families—would hitch up the horse by the light of the stable lantern, eager with haste and sick with fear, counting the time till the doctor could be there.
Then out into the driving snow, urging the horse that knew by instinct that something was amiss, and so mile after mile, till we rounded the corner into the single street of the silent village.