affectionate and highly amused daughter Elsie.
One day the doctor, quietly passing the opened door of the nursery, saw Elsie on the floor with her back turned to him faithfully copying and dramatizing some of the daily scenes of his professional life. His eyes shone with humor as he looked on; but there was sadness in them as he turned silently away.
With the boy it was otherwise. The earliest notion of his father the boy had grasped was that of always travelling toward the sick—to a world that needed him. All the roads of the neighborhood—turnpikes, lanes, carriage-tracks, wagon-tracks, foot-paths—met at his father's house; if you followed any one of them long enough, sooner or later you would reach some one who was sick.
When he was quite young his father began to take him in his buggy on his circuits; and at every house where they stopped, he witnessed this never-ending drama of need and aid. Such countenances people had as they followed his father out to the buggy where he was holding the reins! Such happy faces—or so sad, so sad! Souls hanging on his father's word as though life went on with it or went to pieces with it. Actually his father had no business of his own: he merely drove about and enabled other people to attend to their business! He one day asked him why he did not sometimes do something for himself and the family!
Thus a leading trait in him gripped that branch of his father's life where hung his service to others; and by this vital bond it lifted itself up and began to flourish in its long travel toward maturity. He literally took hold of his father, as a social implement, by the well-worn handle of common use.
His presence in the buggy with his father was not incidental; it was the doctor's design. He wished to have the boy along during these formative years in order that he might get the right start toward the great things of life as these one by one begin to break in upon the attention of a growing boy. The doctor wanted to be the first to talk with him—the first to sow the right suggestions: it was one of his sayings that the earliest suggestions rooted in the mind of the child will be the final things to drop from the dying man's brain: what goes in first comes out last.
And so there began to be many conversations; incredible questions; answers not always forthcoming. And a series of revelations ensued; the boy revealing his growth to a watchful father, and a father revealing his life to a very watchful son! These revelations began to look like mile-stones on life's road, marked with further understandings.
Thus, one day when the boy was a good deal younger than now, his father had come home and had gotten ready to go away again and was sitting before the fire, looking gravely into it and taking solitary counsel about some desperate case, as the country doctor must often do. Being a very little fellow then, he had straddled one of his father's mighty legs and had balanced himself by resting his hands on his father's mighty shoulders.
"Is somebody very sick?"
The head under the weather-roughened hat nodded silently.
"I wonder how it happens that all the sick are in our neighborhood."
A smile flitted across the doctor's mouth.
"The sick are in all neighborhoods, little wonderer."
He said this cheerfully. It was his idea—and he tried to enforce it at home—that young children must never, if possible, make the acquaintance of the words bad and sad—nor of the realities that are masked behind them. He especially believed that what the old are familiar with as life's tragic laws ought never to be told to children as tragic: what is inevitable should never be presented to them as misfortunes.
Therefore he now declared that the sick are in all neighborhoods as he might have stated that there are wings on all birds, or leaves on all growing apple trees.
"Not all over the world?" asked the boy, enlarging his vision in space.
"All over the world," admitted the doctor with entire cheerfulness; the fact was a matter of no consequence.
"Not all the time?" asked the boy, enlarging his outlook in time.
"All the time! All over the world and all the time!" conceded the doctor, as though this made not the slightest difference to a human being.
"Isn't there a single minute when everybody is well everywhere?"
"Not a single, solitary minute."
"Then somebody must always be suffering."
The doctor nodded again; the matter was not worth speaking of.
"Then somebody else must always be sorry."
The doctor bowed encouragingly.
"Then I am sorry, too!"
This time the doctor did not move his head, and he did not open his lips. He saw that a new moment had arrived in the boy's growth—a consciousness of the universal tragedy and personal share and sorrow in it. He knew that many people never feel this; some feel it late; a few feel it early; he had always said that children should never feel it. He knew also that when once it has begun, it never ends. Nothing ever banishes it or stills it—that perception of the human tragedy and one's share and sorrow in it.
He did not welcome its appearance now, in his son least of all. For an instant he charged himself with having made a mistake in taking the child along on his visits to the sick, thus making known too early the dark side of happy neighborhood life. Then he went further back and traced this premature seriousness to its home and its beginning: in prenatal depression—in a mother's anguish and a wife's despair. It was a bitter retrospect: it kept him brooding.
The chatter was persistent. A hand was stretched up, and it took hold of his chin and shook it:—
"There ought to be a country where nobody suffers and there ought to be a time; a large country and a long time."
"There is such a country and there is such a time, Herbert," said the doctor, now with some sadness.
"Then I'll warrant you it's part of the United States," cried the boy, getting his idea of mortality slightly mixed with his early Americanism. "Texas would hold them, wouldn't it? Don't you think Texas could contain them all and contain them forever?"
The doctor laughed and seemed to think enough had been said on the subject of large enough graveyards for the race.
"Why don't you doctors send your patients to that country?"
"Perhaps we do sometimes!" The doctor laughed again.
"Do you ever send yours?"
"Possibly."
"And how many do you send?"
"I don't know!" exclaimed the doctor, laughing this time without being wholly amused. "I don't know, and I never intend to try to find out."
"When I grow up we'll practise together and send twice as many," the boy said, looking into his father's eyes with the flattery of professional imitation.
"So we will! There'll be no trouble about that! Twice as many, perhaps three times! No trouble whatever!"
He took the hands from his shoulders and laid them in the palm of his and studied them—those masculine boyish hands that had never touched any of the world's suffering. And then he looked at his own hands which had handled so much of the
