e had succeeded the district doctor in a more peaceful and
domestic ministration. A skillful and gentle surgeon rather than a
general household practitioner, he was at first coldly welcomed by the
gloomy dyspeptics and ague-haunted settlers from riparian lowlands. The
few bucolic idlers who had relieved the monotony of their lives by the
stimulus of patent medicines and the exaltation of stomach bitters, also
looked askance at him. A common-sense way of dealing with their ailments
did not naturally commend itself to the shopkeepers who vended these
nostrums, and he was made to feel the opposition of trade. But he was
gentle to women and children and animals, and, oddly enough, it was
to this latter dilection that he owed the widow's interest in him--an
interest that eventually made him popular elsewhere.

The widow had a pet dog--a beautiful spaniel, who, however, had
assimilated her graceful languor to his own native love of ease to such
an extent that he failed in a short leap between a balcony and a window,
and fell to the ground with a fractured thigh. The dog was supposed to
be crippled for life even if that life were worth preserving--when Dr.
Blair came to the rescue, set the fractured limb, put it in splints and
plaster after an ingenious design of his own, visited him daily, and
eventually restored him to his mistress's lap sound in wind and limb.
How far this daily ministration and the necessary exchange of sympathy
between the widow and himself heightened his zeal was not known. There
were those who believed that the whole thing was an unmanly trick to get
the better of his rivals in the widow's good graces; there were others
who averred that his treatment of a brute beast like a human being was
sinful and unchristian. "He couldn't have done more for a regularly
baptized child," said the postmistress. "And what mo' would a regularly
baptized child have wanted?" returned Mrs. MacGlowrie, with the drawling
Southern intonation she fell back upon when most contemptuous.

But Dr. Blair's increasing practice and the widow's preoccupation
presently ended their brief intimacy. It was well known that she
encouraged no suitors at the hotel, and his shyness and sensitiveness
shrank from ostentatious advances. There seemed to be no chance of her
becoming, herself, his patient; her sane mind, indolent nerves, and calm
circulation kept her from feminine "vapors" of feminine excesses. She
retained the teeth and digestion of