ook, which he was, nevertheless, careful to hide from the speaker.

The men drew their chairs eagerly up to the doctor's, but for a minute
he did not seem to see them, but sat gazing abstractedly into the fire,
then he took a long draw upon his cigar and began:

"I can see it all very vividly now. It was in the summer time and about
seven years ago. I was practising at the time down in the little town of
Bradford. It was a small and primitive place, just the location for an
impecunious medical man, recently out of college.

"In lieu of a regular office, I attended to business in the first of two
rooms which I rented from Hiram Daly, one of the more prosperous of the
townsmen. Here I boarded and here also came my patients--white and
black--whites from every section, and blacks from 'nigger town,' as the
west portion of the place was called.

"The people about me were most of them coarse and rough, but they were
simple and generous, and as time passed on I had about abandoned my
intention of seeking distinction in wider fields and determined to
settle into the place of a modest country doctor. This was rather a
strange conclusion for a young man to arrive at, and I will not deny
that the presence in the house of my host's beautiful young daughter,
Annie, had something to do with my decision. She was a beautiful young
girl of seventeen or eighteen, and very far superior to her
surroundings. She had a native grace and a pleasing way about her that
made everybody that came under her spell her abject slave. White and
black who knew her loved her, and none, I thought, more deeply and
respectfully than Jube Benson, the black man of all work about the
place.

"He was a fellow whom everybody trusted; an apparently steady-going,
grinning sort, as we used to call him. Well, he was completely under
Miss Annie's thumb, and would fetch and carry for her like a faithful
dog. As soon as he saw that I began to care for Annie, and anybody could
see that, he transferred some of his allegiance to me and became my
faithful servitor also. Never did a man have a more devoted adherent in
his wooing than did I, and many a one of Annie's tasks which he
volunteered to do gave her an extra hour with me. You can imagine that I
liked the boy and you need not wonder any more that as both wooing and
my practice waxed apace, I was content to give up my great ambitions and
stay just where I was.

"It wasn't a very pleasant thing, then, to have an e