The doctor might have been called a successful physician. He had no rivals. There were two inferior performers in the district, it is true, who were by way of following the healing art—small farmers, who were reported to have studied medicine in their youth. One of these, however, had not credit sufficient to purchase drugs, and the other was generally drunk. So it was only their near relations, when not dangerously indisposed, who patronized them—or some patient of the doctor’s now and again, perhaps, who took a fancy the latter was too “aristocratic,” till he got badly sick, and returned with alacrity to his allegiance. There is no doubt, I fear, but that the doctor practised on the lines of thirty years ago. Tory to the backbone in every other department of life, it was hardly to be expected that he should have panted for light and leading in that branch of learning in which he had no rival within reach. Papers or magazines connected with the healing science I never remember to have seen inside the Patton homestead; and yet, after a great deal of experience of the good old man’s professional care, I have a sort of feeling that I would as soon place my life in his hands as in the hands of Sir Omicron Pi!
What time the doctor had to spare from physicking, I have said he devoted to farming and to fox-hunting. I should like to follow him for a bit on his long professional rounds, and listen to his cheery talk in homestead and cabin; to help him fill his long pipe, which he draws out of his top-boot when the patient has settled down to sleep or quiet; to hear him once again chat about tobacco and wheat, politics and foxes. I should like, too, to say something of the doctor’s farming—heaven save the mark—on his two properties; the one “’ard” him by his father, and the other one, the quarter place near by, that “cum to him with his wife, ole Cunnel Pendleton’s daughter.”
I must only pause to remark, however, that the doctor farmed, as he did everything else, in the good old Virginia fashion—or in what is now irreverently known as the “rip and tar (tear) principle.” He didn’t care anything about acres or estimates; and as for farm books, his professional accounts pestered him quite enough. Of rotations, he neither knew nor wanted to know anything. His great idea was to plough and sow as much land as he could scuffle over with all the labor he could scrape together. Of manuring, clovering, or fertilizing, he took little account. If he “pitched” a big crop only, he was a proud and happy man. When each recurring harvest brought results more insignificant than the last, a temporary disgust with the whole business used to seize on my old friend, and he would swear that the wheat crops had been of no account since the war; that tobacco had gone to the devil, and that he’d quit fooling with a plantation for good and all. In the eyes of those who knew him, however, such tirades meant absolutely nothing. A Virginian of his description could no more have helped farming than he could have altered any other of the immutable laws of nature. A younger generation, and many indeed of the older one, have learned wisdom and prudence in the management of land since the abolition of slavery. The doctor, however, and the few left like him, will be land-killers of the genial good old sort till they lie under the once generous sod they have so ruthlessly treated.
The doctor’s first care was of necessity his patients; but there is no doubt, I think, that his real affections were divided between his farm and his fox-hounds. That he did his duty by the former was amply testified to by the popularity he enjoyed. That he signally failed in the treatment of his lands was quite as evident. For while he healed the sores and the wounds of his patients, the sores, the wounds, the storm-rent gullies, the bare galls in his hillsides, grew worse and worse. The maize-stalks grew thinner, the tobacco lighter, the wheat-yield poorer, year by year. One has heard of famous painters, who perversely fancied themselves rather as musicians—of established authors who yearned rather to be praised as artists. So the doctor, who certainly had no local rival in his own profession, seemed to covet fame rather as the champion and exponent of a happily departing school of Southern agriculturists. In this case, the income derived from the profession just sufficed to make good the losses on the farm. So, though the doctor, in spite of his household expenses being almost nil, could never by any chance lay his hand on a five-dollar bill, he managed to keep upon the whole pretty free from debt. With a scattered practice, and an agricultural hobby extending over one thousand acres, including woods and old fields “turned out” to recover, it may be a matter of surprise that our old friend had leisure for a third indulgence, especially one like fox-hunting, which is connected in the British mind with such a large consumption of time. Nevertheless, the doctor, like most of his compeers, was passionately fond of the chase, and in spite of the war and altered times, had kept hounds round him almost without a break since he was a boy. It will be seen, however, that fox-hunting, as understood and followed by the doctor, was by no means incompatible with his more serious avocations.
Now, if the fashion in which the doctor pursued the wily fox was not orthodox from a Leicestershire point of view, it was for all that none the less, perhaps indeed so much the more, genuine. Around New York and Philadelphia, it is true, the sport is pursued by fashionable bankers, brokers, and lawyers in a style the most approved. All the bravery and the glitter, ay, and much of the horsemanship of the British hunting-field, is there. But, like polo and coaching, it is there as a mere exotic, transplanted but yesterday, to the amazement and occasionally indignation of the Long Island rustics and the delight of the society papers. Everything is there—hounds, huntsmen, whips, red coats, tops, splendidly mounted hard-riding ladies and gentlemen, sherry-flasks, sandwich-boxes, etc., etc.,—everything, in short, but the fox. So far, however, as I can learn, such an omission is of no great importance under the modern conception of hunting. That wouldn’t be the doctor’s way of thinking at all, though; for I must here remark, that that worthy sportsman’s love of hunting is entirely on hereditary principles and of native growth. Fox-hunting for two centuries has been the natural pastime of the Virginia gentry. They imported the chase of the fox and its customs from the mother country at a period when such things were conducted in a very different style from what they are now.
The hunting of the fox, as carried on in England early in the last century, let us say, offered, I take it, a very different spectacle from that seen in the elaborate and gorgeous cavalcades and the rushing fleet-footed hounds that race to-day over the trim, well-trained turf of the shires. No foxes were killed in those days in twenty-five minutes, I’ll warrant. Men started their fox at daybreak and pottered along, absorbed in the performance of their slow hounds, over the rushy, soppy, heathy country, from wood to wood, for hours and hours. They were lucky then, no doubt, if Reynard succumbed in time to admit of their punctual appearance at that tremendous three o’clock orgie, which the poet Thomson has so graphically laid before us.
Amid the glitter, the show, the dash, the swagger of modern fox-hunting, Englishmen who are not masters of hounds or huntsmen are apt to lose sight of the original ends and aims, the craft, and the science of the sport. It seems to me that fox-hunting nowadays, with the vast mass of its devotees, is simply steeplechasing over an unknown course. This is unquestionably a manly and a fine amusement, and far be it from me to breathe a word against it. I only wish to anticipate the sneers of your sporting stock-broker if he were to catch sight of the doctor and his hounds upon a hunting morning.
With the average Nimrod of modern days, I venture then to assert that fox-hunting is only a modified form of steeplechasing. With the Virginian, who is simply a survival of other days, it is nothing of the kind. The doctor knew nothing of bullfinches or double ditches, of post and rails or five-barred gates, in a sporting sense; but what he did not know about a fox was not worth knowing at all. As for his hounds, he could tell the note of each at a distance when the music of a whole pack was scarcely audible to the ordinary ear.
As far as I remember, the doctor used generally to keep about five couple of hounds. It is needless to say he always swore they were the “best stock of fox-dogs in the State.” Jim Pendleton, his cousin across the hill, and Judge Massey, on the north side of the county, who also kept hounds, were quite prepared to take an affidavit of the same kind with regard to their own respective packs. The doctor’s hounds lived as members of the family. A kind of effort was spasmodically made to keep them from appropriating the parlor, and so long as the weather was mild, they were fairly content to lie in the front porch, or in one of the many passages which let the air circulate freely through the Patton homestead.
If the weather was cold, however, and the doctor had a fire in the parlor, the older and more knowing dogs seldom failed eventually to gain a lodgment. By persistently coming in at one door, and when kicked out by the long-suffering M. F. H., slowly going round the house and slyly entering at the other, they invariably conquered in the long run, and established themselves on the warm bricks of the hearth before the great white-oak logs which blazed on the bright brass and irons.