Let us take his proffered hand and feel the heartiness of its
greeting, feel its friendly shake, even to our shoe-soles. His good
humor beams from his deep-blue eyes; his shock of gray hair, which
knows no comb but his fingers, is pushed back from a brow which might
have been a scholar's, were it not so florid. A soft, white linen
shirt rolls deeply open, exposing a grizzled expanse of powerful
chest. Roomy, baggy, spotless, linen trousers do homage to the heat,
as does his broad, palm-fiber hat, used chiefly as a fan. Doctor Jim
McDonald, six feet in his socks, weighing 180 pounds, erect and manly
in bearing in spite of his negligee, is a remarkable specimen of
physical manhood at sixty-five. Even with the Saturday afternoon
crowds of the cotton-picking season, Main Street seems deserted if his
resounding laughter is not heard; but it takes something as serious as
a funeral to keep him away from his accustomed bench in front of
Doctor Will's drug-store, centrally located on the shady side of the
street. Doctor Will is Doctor Jim's brother, and is, according to the
negroes, a "sho-nuff" doctor.

Doctor Jim's life is comfortably monotonous. He had put up the first
windmill in the region roundabout and his was the first real bath-tub
in the county, and long before Donaldsville thought of water-works,
Doctor Jim's windmill was keeping the big cistern on stilts filled
from his deep artesian well. He started each day with a stimulating
plunge in his big tub, and never tired proclaiming that with this and
enough good whiskey he would live to be a hundred--and then Main
Street would stop and listen to the generous reverberations of his
deep-chested laugh. Three good meals, the best old Aunt Sue could cook
and Aunt Sue came from Mississippi with them after the war--were eaten
with an unflagging relish by this man whose digestion had never