such a comfortable and honored one as Dr. Leslie's. What his friends
were apt to call his notions were not of such aggressive nature that
he was accused of outlawry, and he was apt to speak his mind
uncontradicted and undisturbed. He cared little for the friction and
attrition, indeed for the inspiration, which one is sure to have who
lives among many people, and which are so dear and so helpful to most
of us who fall into ruts if we are too much alone. He loved his
friends and his books, though he understood both as few scholars can,
and he cared little for social pleasure, though Oldfields was, like
all places of its size and dignity, an epitome of the world. One or
two people of each class and rank are as good as fifty, and, to use
the saying of the doctor's friend, old Captain Finch: "Human nature is
the same the world over."

Through the long years of his solitary life, and his busy days as a
country practitioner, he had become less and less inclined to take
much part in what feeble efforts the rest of the townspeople made to
entertain themselves. He was more apt to loiter along the street,
stopping here and there to talk with his neighbors at their gates or
their front-yard gardening, and not infrequently asked some one who
stood in need of such friendliness to take a drive with him out into
the country. Nobody was grieved at remembering that he was a
repository of many secrets; he was a friend who could be trusted
always, though he was one who had been by no means slow to anger or
unwilling at times to administer rebuke.


One Sunday afternoon, late in November, while the first snow-storm of
the year was beginning, Dr. Leslie threw down a stout French medical
work of high renown as if it had failed to fulfil its mission of being