wouldn't have him left without any one?"

What the effect of such an attitude was may be judged when it is related
that there was scarcely a man, woman or child in the entire county who
had not at some time or other been directly or indirectly benefited by
the kindly wisdom of this Samaritan. He was nearly everybody's doctor,
in the last extremity, either as consultant or otherwise. Everywhere he
went, by every lane and hollow that he fared, he was constantly being
called into service by some one--the well-to-do as well as by those who
had nothing; and in both cases he was equally keen to give the same
degree of painstaking skill, finding something in the very poor--a
humanness possibly--which detained and fascinated him and made him a
little more prone to linger at their bedsides than anywhere else.

"He was always doing it," said his daughter, "and my mother used to
worry over it. She declared that of all things earthly, papa loved an
unfortunate person; the greater the misfortune, the greater his care."

In illustration of his easy and practically controlling attitude toward
the very well-to-do, who were his patients also, let me narrate this:

In our town was an old and very distinguished colonel, comparatively
rich and very crotchety, who had won considerable honors for himself
during the Civil War. He was a figure, and very much looked up to by
all. People were, in the main, overawed by and highly respectful of him.
A remote, stern soul, yet to Dr. Gridley he was little more than a child
or schoolboy--one to be bossed on occasion and made to behave. Plainly,
the doctor had the conviction that all of us, great and small, were very
much in need of sympathy and care, and that he, the doctor, was the one
to provide it. At any rate, he had known the colonel long and well, and
in a public place--at the principal street corner, for instance, or in
the postoffice where we school children were wont to congregate--it was
not at all surprising to hear him take the old colonel, who was quite
frail now, to task for not taking better care of himself--coming out,
for instance, without his rubbers, or his overcoat, in wet or chilly
weather, and in other ways misbehaving himself.

"There you go again!" I once heard him call to the colonel, as the
latter was leaving the postoffice and he was entering (there was no
rural free delivery in those days) "--walking around without your
rubbers, and no overcoat! You want to get me up i