tion>George Van Schaick
Sweetapple Cove
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066133276
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
From John Grant's Diary
Have I shown wisdom or made an arrant, egregious fool of myself? This, I suppose, is a question every man puts to himself after taking a sudden decision upon which a great deal depends.
I have shaken the dust of the great city by the Hudson and forsaken its rich laboratories, its vast hospitals, the earnest workers who were beginning to show some slight interest in me. It was done not after mature consideration but owing to the whim of a moment, to a sudden desire to change the trend of things I felt I could no longer contend with.
Now I live in a little house, among people who speak with an accent that has become unfamiliar to the great outside world. They have given up their two best rooms to me, at a rental so small that I am somewhat ashamed to tender it, at the end of every week. I also obtain the constant care and the pleasant smiles of a good old housewife who appears to take a certain amount of pride in her lodger. As far as I know I am the only boarder in Sweetapple Cove, as well as the only doctor. For a day or two after my arrival I accompanied the local parson, Mr. Barnett, on visits to people he considered to be in need of my ministrations. Now they are coming in droves, and many scattered dwellers on the bleak coast have heard of me. Little fishing-smacks meeting others from farther outports have spread the amazing news that there is a doctor at the Cove.
With other pomps and vanities I have given up white shirts and collars, and my recent purchases include oilskins and long boots. This is fashionable apparel here, and my wearing them appears to impart confidence in my ability.
My only reason for writing this is that the Barnetts go to bed early. Doubtless I may also acquire the habit, in good time. Moreover, there is always a danger of disturbing some important sermon-writing. In common decency I can't bother these delightful people every evening, although they have begged me to consider their home as my own. Mrs. Barnett is a most charming woman, and never in my life have I known anything like the welcome she impulsively extended, but she works hard and I cannot intrude too much. Hence the hours after nine are exceedingly long, when it chances that there are no sick people to look after. At first, of course, I just mooned around, and called myself all sorts of names, honestly considering myself the most stupendous fool ever permitted to exist in freedom from restraint. I plunged into books and devoured the medical weeklies which the irregular mails of the place brought me, yet this did not entirely suffice, and now I have begun to write. It may help the time to pass away, and prevent the attacks of mold and rust. Later on, if things do not shape themselves according to my hopes, these dangers will be of little import. These sheets may then mildew with the dampness of this land, or fly away to sea with the shrewd breezes that sweep over our coast, for all I shall care. At any rate they will have served their purpose.
Of course I am trying to swallow my medicine like a little man. If there is a being I despise it is the fellow who whimpers. There is little that is admirable in professional pugilism, saving the smile often seen on a fighter's face after he has just received a particularly hard and crushing blow. Indeed, that smile is the bruiser's apology for his life.
Lest it be inferred that I have been fighting, I hasten to declare that it was a rather one-sided contest in which I was defeated, lock, stock and barrel, by a mere slip of a girl towards whom I had only lifted up my hands in supplication.
"We are both very young, John," she explained to me, with an exasperating, if unconscious, imitation of the doctors she had observed as they announced very disagreeable things to their patients. "Our lives are practically only beginning. Until now we have been like the vegetables that are brought up in little wooden boxes. We are to be taken up and planted in a field, where we are to grow up into something
