r much going and coming, had
not failed of being several times in Europe. She especially affected
Florence, where she was believed to have studied the Tuscan School to
unusual purpose, though this was not apparent in any work of her own. We
formed the notion that she might be uncomfortably cultured, but when
she came to call with Mrs. Talbert afterward, my wife reported that you
would not have thought, except for a remark she dropped now and then,
that she had ever been out of her central New York village, and so far
from putting on airs of art, she did not speak of any gallery abroad, or
of the pensions in which she stayed in Florence, or the hotels in other
cities of Italy where she had stopped to visit the local schools of
painting.

In this somewhat protracted excursion I have not forgotten that I left
Mr. Talbert leaning against our party fence, with his arms resting on
the top, after a keen if not critical survey of his dwelling. He did not
take up our talk at just the point where we had been in it, but after a
reflective moment, he said, "I don't remember just whether Mrs. Temple
told my mother-in-law you were homoeopaths or allopaths."

"Well," I said, "that depends. I rather think we are homoeopaths of
a low-potency type." My neighbor's face confessed a certain
disappointment. "But we are not bigoted, even in the article of
appreciable doses. Our own family doctor in our old place always advised
us, in stress of absence from him, to get the best doctor wherever
we happened to be, so far as we could make him out, and not mind what
school he was of. I suppose we have been treated by as many allopaths as
homoeopaths, but we're rather a healthy family, and put it all together
we have not been treated a great deal by either."

Mr. Talbert looked relieved. "Oh, then you will have Dr. Denbigh. He
puts your rule the other way, and gets the best patient he can, no
matter whether he is a homoeopath or an allopath. We have him, in all
our branches; he is the best doctor in Eastridge, and he is the best
man. I want you to know him, and you can't know a doctor the way you
ought to, unless he's your family physician."

"You're quite right, I think, but that's a matter I should have to leave
two-thirds of to my wife: women are two-thirds of the patients in
every healthy family, and they ought to have the ruling voice about the
doctor." We had formed the habit already of laughing at any appearance
of joke in each other, an