oy."

"You've been a fine, strong, healthy girl, and you still are," he
replied, quietly.

It was only such approval as Harry Lawrence, for instance, might have
bestowed on a blue-ribbon pointer. The man considers me as a rather nice
specimen and, with all due modesty, I am inclined to agree with him.

By this time we were rapidly nearing the island. As far as I could see it
was nothing but a rough mass of rocks better suited to the tenancy of
sea-gulls than human beings. Everywhere the waves were breaking at the
foot of the cliffs and monstrous boulders. A great host of sea-birds was
rising from it and returning; in the waters near us the dear little
petrels dotted the surface with black points, while slow-flying gannets
traveled sedately and active terns rioted in the air. Coots and other
sea-ducks rose before our boat and, from time to time, the little round
heads of harbor seals, with very human-looking eyes, bobbed on the seas.

"Isn't it perfectly delightful," I cried. "I could never weary of
watching all these things, and what is that big duck, or is it a goose,
traveling all alone and flying straight as an arrow?"

"It is just a big loon. The Great Northern Diver, you know."

"I don't think I ever saw them flying. I shall always recognize one
again. They are regular double-enders, pointed at both ends. Is it the
same sort of loon that we see on the Maine and Adirondack lakes?"

"The very same," he replied. "I dare say you are well acquainted with its
voice."

"Indeed I am; it used to give me goose-flesh when I first heard it, ever
so long ago. It's a dreadfully shivery sound."

The man smiled, as if he thought this a pretty fair description.

"It is rather spooky," he admitted, "but I love it as a typical sound of
the wilderness. It is just redolent with memories of the scented smoke of
camp-fires, of game-tracked swamps and big forests mirrored in deep, calm
waters all aglow with the lights of the setting sun."

This interested me. It is evident that this doctor is not simply a fairly
well educated dispenser of pills and a wielder of horrid instruments.
There is some tincture of sentiment in his make-up.

"How do you enjoy the practice of your profession in Sweetapple Cove?" I
suddenly asked him, rather irrelevantly.

"I have an idea that it is a sort of practice for which I am fairly well
fitted," he answered, slowly, and still looking at the birds. "A fellow
can never be sure that he would make