My Summer with Doctor Singletary | Page 2

would scarcely know his once familiar
vehicle as it whirls glittering along the main road to the village. For the
rest, all things go on as usual; the miller grinds, the blacksmith strikes
and blows, the cobbler and tailor stitch and mend, old men sit in the
autumn sun, old gossips stir tea and scandal, revival meetings alternate
with apple-bees and bushings,--toil, pleasure, family jars, petty
neighborhood quarrels, courtship, and marriage,--all which make up the
daily life of a country village continue as before. The little chasm
which his death has made in the hearts of the people where he lived and
labored seems nearly closed up. There is only one more grave in the
burying-ground,--that is all.
Let nobody infer from what I have said that the good man died

unlamented; for, indeed, it was a sad day with his neighbors when the
news, long expected, ran at last from house to house and from
workshop to workshop, "Dr. Singletary is dead!"
He had not any enemy left among them; in one way or another he had
been the friend and benefactor of all. Some owed to his skill their
recovery from sickness; others remembered how he had watched with
anxious solicitude by the bedside of their dying relatives, soothing
them, when all human aid was vain, with the sweet consolations of that
Christian hope which alone pierces the great shadow of the grave and
shows the safe stepping-stones above the dark waters. The old missed a
cheerful companion and friend, who had taught them much without
wounding their pride by an offensive display of his superiority, and
who, while making a jest of his own trials and infirmities, could still
listen with real sympathy to the querulous and importunate complaints
of others. For one day, at least, even the sunny faces of childhood were
marked with unwonted thoughtfulness; the shadow of the common
bereavement fell over the play-ground and nursery. The little girl
remembered, with tears, how her broken-limbed doll had taxed the
surgical ingenuity of her genial old friend; and the boy showed
sorrowfully to his playmates the top which the good Doctor had given
him. If there were few, among the many who stood beside his grave,
capable of rightly measuring and appreciating the high intellectual and
spiritual nature which formed the background of his simple social life,
all could feel that no common loss had been sustained, and that the
kindly and generous spirit which had passed away from them had not
lived to himself alone.
As you follow the windings of one of the loveliest rivers of New
England, a few miles above the sea-mart, at its mouth, you can see on a
hill, whose grassy slope is checkered with the graceful foliage of the
locust, and whose top stands relieved against a still higher elevation,
dark with oaks and walnuts, the white stones of the burying-place. It is
a quiet spot, but without gloom, as befits "God's Acre." Below is the
village, with its sloops and fishing-boats at the wharves, and its
crescent of white houses mirrored in the water. Eastward is the misty
line of the great sea. Blue peaks of distant mountains roughen the
horizon of the north. Westward, the broad, clear river winds away into
a maze of jutting bluffs and picturesque wooded headlands. The tall,

white stone on the westerly slope of the hill bears the name of
"Nicholas Singletary, M. D.," and marks the spot which he selected
many years before his death. When I visited it last spring, the air about
it was fragrant with the bloom of sweet-brier and blackberry and the
balsamic aroma of the sweet-fern; birds were singing in the birch-trees
by the wall; and two little, brown-locked, merry-faced girls were
making wreaths of the dandelions and grasses which grew upon the old
man's grave. The sun was setting behind the western river-bluffs,
flooding the valley with soft light, glorifying every object and fusing all
into harmony and beauty. I saw and felt nothing to depress or sadden
me. I could have joined in the laugh of the children. The light whistle
of a young teamster, driving merrily homeward, did not jar upon my
ear; for from the transfigured landscape, and from the singing birds,
and from sportive childhood, and from blossoming sweetbrier, and
from the grassy mound before me, I heard the whisper of one word
only, and that word was PEACE.

CHAPTER. II.
SOME ACCOUNT OF PEEWAWKIN ON THE TOCKETUCK.
WELL and truly said the wise man of old, "Much study is a weariness
to the flesh." Hard and close application through the winter had left me
ill prepared to resist the baleful influences of a New England spring. I
shrank alike from the storms of March, the capricious changes of April,
and