The great oak logs blaze and crackle and roar in the wide chimney, and the light of the flames flickers over the quaint, low-ceilinged room with its whitewashed walls, black wainscotting, and homely decorations; over the antlers on the door, that recall some early exploit of the doctor’s in West Virginia wilds; over the odds and ends of old silver on the sideboard, that have been saved from the wreck of the Patton grandeur; over the big oil-painting of the famous jurist, and the dimmer, smokier visages of less distinguished but remoter ancestors, who believed in the divine right of kings and knew nothing of republics and universal suffrage. Here, however, surrounded by his dogs, we must take leave of the doctor. There are few like him left now in Virginia, and fewer still who have clung to the good and bad of a departed era with the same uncompromising tenacity as our old friend. They were a fine race—deny it who will—these old Virginia squires; provincial and prejudiced perhaps, but full of originality and manly independence. Their ideas, it is true, are not those of the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the men themselves are passing rapidly away, and their ideas with them. Those who have known them can only regret that a strong, picturesque, and admirable type of Anglo-Saxon has disappeared forever from the ranks of our great family, unpainted by a single master-hand of contemporary date.
A. G. Bradley.
XX
THE DOCTOR’S FRONT YARD.
IT ALL began with the tap of a gavel—an imposing white gavel adorned with a yellow bow and resounding like the crack of doom. Behind it, under a nodding purple ostrich feather, sat Mrs. Bunker; before it the eight awe-struck members of the Village Improvement Society; enveloping us all in its cold, judicial atmosphere was room No. 10 of the new town building, maintained as a meeting place in order to give dignity to our association, and its rent representing just so many entertainments and strawberry-festivals per annum.
Mrs. Bunker is the “progressive woman” of West Hedgeworth. She lives in that large, white house with the terraces and box borders and a fountain, just where you turn into Main street. She goes to Boston twice each season to get clothes and ideas upon which she feeds our little social circle through the medium of clubs and afternoon teas. The clothes are remarkable, the ideas equally up to date; we look upon her with reverence and obey her slightest mandate.