hilarious. Quantities of old apple-jack were forced upon them. The old
woman in the adjoining bedroom, although she was evidently suffering,
kept calling out a feeble joke in her cackling old voice.

"Those people seem positively elated because that old soul is sick,"
said James when he and the doctor were again in the buggy.

"They are," said Doctor Gordon, "even the old woman herself, who knows
well enough that she has not long to live. Did you ever think that the
desire of distinction was one of the most, perhaps the most, intense
purely spiritual emotion of the human soul? Look at the way these people
live here, grubbing away at the soil like ants. The most of them have in
their lives just three ways of attracting notice, the momentary
consideration of their kind: birth, marriage, sickness and death. With
the first they are hardly actively concerned, even with the second many
have nothing to do. There are more women than men as usual, and although
the women want to marry, all the men do not. There remains only sickness
and death for a stand-by, so to speak. If one of them is really sick and
dies, the people are aroused to take notice. The sick person and the
corpse have a certain state and dignity which they have never attained
before. Why, bless you, man, I have one patient, a middle-aged woman,
who has been laid up for years with rheumatism, and she is fairly
vainglorious, and so is her mother. She brags of her invalid daughter.
If she had been merely an old maid on her hands, she would have been
ashamed of her, and the woman herself would have been sour and
discontented. But she has fairly married rheumatism. It has been to her
as a husband and children. I tell you, young man, one has to have his
little footstool of elevation among his fellows, even if it is a mighty
queer one, or he loses his self-respect, and self-respect is the best
jewel we have."