under what was
indubitably the weight of his sixty-three years. He was slightly
perturbed. He had been fagged out before, to be sure. A man cannot
practice medicine out of a Newfoundland outport harbor for
thirty-seven years and not know what it means to stomach a physical
exhaustion. It was not that. What perturbed Doctor Rolfe was the
singular coincidence of a touch of melancholy with the ominous
complaint of his lean old legs.

And presently there was a more disquieting revelation. In the drear,
frosty dusk, when he rounded Creep Head, opened the lights of
Afternoon Arm, and caught the warm, yellow gleam of the lamp in the
surgery window, his expectation ran all at once to his supper and his
bed. He was hungry--that was true. Sleepy? No; he was not sleepy. Yet
he wanted to go to bed. Why? He wanted to go to bed in the way that
old men want to go to bed--less to sleep than just to sigh and stretch
out and rest. And this anxious wish for bed--just to stretch out and
rest--held its definite implication. It was more than symptomatic--it
was shocking.

"That's age!"

It was.

"Hereafter, as an old man should," Doctor Rolfe resolved, "I go with
caution and I take my ease."

* * * * *

And it was in this determination that Doctor Rolfe opened the surgery
door and came gratefully into the warmth and light and familiar odors
of the little room. Caution was the wisdom and privilege of age,
wasn't it? he reflected after supper in the glow of the surgery fire.
There was no shame in it, was there? Did duty require of a man that he
should practice medicine out of Afternoon Arm for thirty-seven
years--in all sorts of weather and along a hundred and thirty miles of
the worst coast in the world--and go recklessly into a future of
increasing inadequacy? It did not! He had stood his watch. What did he
owe life? Nothing--nothing! He had paid in full. Well, then, what did
life owe him? It owed him something, didn't it? Didn't life owe him
at least an old age of reasonable ease and self-respecting
independence? It did!

By this time the more he reflected, warming his lean, aching shanks
the while, the more he dwelt upon the bitter incidents of that one
hundred and thirty miles of harsh coast, through the thirty-seven
years he had managed to survive the winds and seas and frosts of it;
and the more he dwelt upon his straitened circumstances and increasing
age the more petulant he grew.

It was i