t delightful
character in "The Vicar of Wakefield" (my friend the Scotch Preacher
loves to tell about him), who seasons error by crying out "Fudge!"

"Fudge!" I said.

We're all poor sinners!

XI

THE COUNTRY DOCTOR

_Sunday afternoon, June 9._

We had a funeral to-day in this community and the longest funeral
procession, Charles Baxter says, he has seen in all the years of his
memory among these hills. A good man has gone away--and yet remains. In
the comparatively short time I have been here I never came to know him
well personally, though I saw him often in the country roads, a ruddy
old gentleman with thick, coarse, iron-gray hair, somewhat stern of
countenance, somewhat shabby of attire, sitting as erect as a trooper in
his open buggy, one muscular hand resting on his knee, the other holding
the reins of his familiar old white horse. I said I did not come to know
him well personally, and yet no one who knows this community can help
knowing Doctor John North. I never so desired the gift of moving
expression as I do at this moment, on my return from his funeral, that I
may give some faint idea of what a good man means to a community like
ours--as the more complete knowledge of it has come to me to-day.

In the district school that I attended when a boy we used to love to
leave our mark, as we called it, wherever our rovings led us. It was a
bit of boyish mysticism, unaccountable now that we have grown older and
wiser (perhaps); but it had its meaning. It was an instinctive
outreaching of the young soul to perpetuate the knowledge of its
existence upon this forgetful earth. My mark, I remember, was a notch
and a cross. With what secret fond diligence I carved it in the gray
bark of beech trees, on fence posts, or on barn doors, and once, I
remember, on the roof-ridge of our home, and once, with high imaginings
of how long it would remain, I spent hours chiseling it deep in a
hard-headed old boulder in the pasture, where, if man has been as kind
as Nature, it remains to this day. If you should chance to see it you
would not know of the boy who carved it there.

So Doctor North left his secret mark upon the neighbourhood--as all of
us do, for good or for ill, upon _our_ neighbourhoods, in accordance
with the strength of that character which abides within us. For a long
time I did not know that it was he, though it was not difficult to see
that some strong good man had often passed this way. I saw the mys