for practice, was known to have gone
out as surgeon with one of the regiments there. It was not supposed that
he went from patriotism; but when he came back, a year before the end of
the struggle, and settled in his native place, his service in the army
was accepted among his old neighbors as evidence of a better disposition
of some sort than had hitherto been attributable to any of his name.

In fact, the lazy, good-natured boy, whom they chiefly remembered before
his college days, had always been well enough liked among those who had
since grown to be first mates and ship captains in the little port where
he was born and grew up. They had now all retired from the sea, and,
having survived its manifold perils, were patiently waiting to be
drowned in sail-boats on the bay. They were of the second generation of
ships' captains still living in Corbitant; but they would be the last.
The commerce of the little port had changed into the whaling trade in
their time; this had ceased in turn, and the wharves had rotted away.
Dr. Mulbridge found little practice among them; while attending their
appointed fate, they were so thoroughly salted against decay as to
preserve even their families. But he gradually gathered into his hands,
from the clairvoyant and the Indian doctor, the business which they had
shared between them since his father's death. There was here and there a
tragical case of consumption among the farming families along the coast,
and now and then a frightful accident among the fishermen; the spring
and autumn brought their typhoid; the city people who came down to the
neighboring hotels were mostly sick, or fell sick; and with the small
property his father had left, he and his mother contrived to live.

They dwelt very harmoniously together; for his mother, who had passed
more than a quarter of a century in strong resistance to her husband's
will, had succumbed, as not uncommonly happens with such women, to the
authority of her son, whom she had no particular pleasure or advantage
in thwarting. In the phrase and belief of his neighbors, he took after
her, rather than his father; but there was something ironical and
baffling in him, which the local experts could not trace to either the
Mulbridges or the Gardiners. They had a quiet, indifferent faith in his
ability to make himself a position and name anywhere; but they were
not surprised that he had come back to live in Corbitant, which was so
manifestly the best pl