The host and guest talked very late the night before, and told each
other many things. Dr. Leslie had somewhat unwillingly undertaken the
country practice which had grown dearer to him with every year, but
there were family reasons why he had decided to stay in Oldfields for
a few months at least, and though it was not long before he was left
alone, not only by the father and mother whose only child he was, but
by his wife and child, he felt less and less inclination to break the
old ties and transplant himself to some more prominent position of the
medical world. The leisure he often had at certain seasons of the year
was spent in the studies which always delighted him, and little by
little he gained great repute among his professional brethren. He was
a scholar and a thinker in other than medical philosophies, and most
persons who knew anything of him thought it a pity that he should be
burying himself alive, as they were pleased to term his devotion to
his provincial life. His rare excursions to the cities gave more
pleasure to other men than to himself, however, in these later years,
and he laughingly proclaimed himself to be growing rusty and behind
the times to Dr. Ferris, who smiled indulgently, and did not take the
trouble to contradict so untrue and preposterous an assertion.

If one man had been a stayer at home; a vegetable nature, as Dr.
Leslie had gone on to say, which has no power to change its locality
or to better itself by choosing another and more adequate or
stimulating soil; the other had developed the opposite extreme of
character, being by nature a rover. From the medical school he had
entered at once upon the duties of a naval appointment, and after he
had become impatient of its routine of practice and its check upon his
freedom, he had gone, always with some sufficient and useful object,
to one far country after another. Lately he had spent an unusual