outburst, she met Dr. Eben Williams coming down the avenue. Her first
impulse was to plunge into the shrubbery, on the right hand or the left,
and escape him. The baby was now four weeks old, and yet Hetty had never
till to-day seen the doctor. It had been a very sore point between her
and Sally, that Sally would persist in having this young Dr. Williams
from the "Corners," instead of old Dr. Tuthill, who had been the family
doctor at "Gunn's" for nearly fifty years. It was the only quarrel that
Hetty and Sally had ever had; and it came near being a very serious one:
but Hetty suddenly recollected herself, and exclaiming:

"Why bless me, Sally, I haven't any right to decide what doctor you're
to have when you're sick; I'll never say another word about it; only you
needn't expect me ever to speak to that Eben Williams; I never expected
to see him under my roof," she dropped the subject and never alluded to
it again.

Her first impulse, as we said, when she saw the obnoxious doctor coming
towards her now, was to fly; her second one of anger with herself for
the first. "I'm on my own ground," she thought with some of the old
Squire's honest pride stirring her veins, "I think I will not run away
from the popinjay."

It was hard to know just how such a dislike to Dr. Eben Williams had
grown up in Hetty's friendly heart. He had come some four years before
to practise medicine at Lonway Four Corners. His bright and cordial
face, his social manner, his superior education, readiness, and
resource, had quickly won away many patients from old Dr. Tuthill, who
still drove about the country as he had driven for half a century, with
a ponderous black leather case full of calomel and jalap swung under
his sulky. A few old families, the Gunns among the number, adhered