lad to accompany him as guide on a shooting expedition
next day. The arrangement turned out satisfactorily, and was repeated
more than once, with the consequence that Dan and the stranger talked
about many things in the course of several long tramps, until one
evening the latter, sitting on a stone wall after a steep pull uphill,
made Dan an offer which caused the most familiar objects to seem unreal,
because a marvellous dream was coming true among them. For Mr. Willett
proposed to take Dan home with him, and have him taught whatever he most
wished to learn. "You're a smart lad, Dan," he said, "and I reckon
you'll make more of that in the States than in this country."

"Ah! the doctorin'," said Dan, turning as red as the young sorrel
leaves, and letting his darling wish slip out in his surprise as
involuntarily as he would have blinked at a flash of lightning. But next
moment he remembered Nicholas, and fell silent; Nicholas, who had not
looked him in the face since that snowy evening weeks ago. The dream
seemed to stop coming true.

"There's no need to make up your mind in a hurry," said Mr. Willett,
"you can be thinking it over between this and Monday."

Dan did think it over deeply that night and the next day and the day
after. He thought how fine, if rather fearful, it would be to go on such
a journey; and what a splendid thing to learn the doctoring business,
and some day come home again able to cure everybody of anything that
ailed them. "For out in the States, like enough, they had all manner of
contrivances the people over here had never taught Dr. Hamilton," whose
skill was occasionally baffled. He imagined the neighbours' surprise
when he came driving up on his car; if possible he would be driving a
little blue-roan mare like Farmer Finucane's Rosemary, with whom he had
made friends in the course of many shoeings. He thought he would be
sorry to miss seeing them all for so long; and yet it would certainly be
very pleasant, in a way, to get to a place where things were a bit
different sometimes, not like here where when you were getting up in the
morning you knew what was bound to be happening all day just as well as
you did when you were going to bed that night. And next he thought that
such days would be coming to Nicholas, while he himself was away seeing
and learning "all manner of everything;" and that if he had held his
tongue that time, maybe Nicholas would have got his chance with Mr.
Polymathers's m