nd and
brightened with door-yard flowers and creepers, straggled off into the
boat-houses and fishing-huts on the shore, and the village seemed to get
afloat at last in the sloops and schooners riding in the harbor, whose
smooth plane rose higher to the eye than the town itself. The salt
and the sand were everywhere, but though there had been no positive
prosperity in Corbitant for a generation, the place had an impregnable
neatness, which defied decay; if there had been a dog in the street,
there would not have been a stick to throw at him.

One of the better, but not the best, of the village houses, which did
not differ from the others in any essential particular, and which
stood flush upon the street, bore a door-plate with the name Dr. Rufus
Mulbridge, and Libby drew up in front of it without having had to alarm
the village with inquiries. Grace forbade his help in dismounting, and
ran to the door, where she rang one of those bells which sharply respond
at the back of the panel to the turn of a crank in front; she observed,
in a difference of paint, that this modern improvement had displaced
an old-fashioned knocker. The door was opened by a tall and strikingly
handsome old woman, whose black eyes still kept their keen light under
her white hair, and whose dress showed none of the incongruity which was
offensive in the door-bell: it was in the perfection of an antiquated
taste, which, however, came just short of characterizing it with gentle
womanliness.

"Is Dr. Mulbridge at home?" asked Grace.

"Yes," said the other, with a certain hesitation, and holding the door
ajar.

"I should like to see him," said Grace, mounting to the threshold.

"Is it important?" asked the elder woman.

"Quite," replied Grace, with an accent at once of surprise and decision.

"You may come in," said the other reluctantly, and she opened a door
into a room at the side of the hall.

"You may give Dr. Mulbridge my card, if you please," said Grace, before
she turned to go into this room; and the other took it, and left her
to find a chair for herself. It was a country doctor's office, with the
usual country doctor's supply of drugs on a shelf, but very much more
than the country doctor's usual library: the standard works were there,
and there were also the principal periodicals and the latest treatises
of note in the medical world. In a long, upright case, like that of an
old hall-clock, was the anatomy of one who had long done with