My Summer with Doctor Singletary | Page 5

of a healthy town: and if it had
been otherwise, Dr. Singletary was the last man in the world to
transmute the aches and ails of its inhabitants into gold for his own
pocket. So, at the age of sixty, he was little better off, in point of
worldly substance, than when he came into possession of the small
homestead of his father. He cultivated with his own hands his corn-
field and potato-patch, and trimmed his apple and pear trees, as well
satisfied with his patrimony as Horace was with his rustic Sabine villa.
In addition to the care of his homestead and his professional duties, he
had long been one of the overseers of the poor and a member of the
school committee in his town; and he was a sort of standing reference
in all disputes about wages, boundaries, and cattle trespasses in his
neighborhood. He had, nevertheless, a good deal of leisure for reading,
errands of charity, and social visits. He loved to talk with his friends,
Elder Staples, the minister, Deacon Warner, and Skipper Evans. He
was an expert angler, and knew all the haunts of pickerel and trout for
many miles around. His favorite place of resort was the hill back of his
house, which afforded a view of the long valley of the Tocketuck and
the great sea. Here he would sit, enjoying the calm beauty of the
landscape, pointing out to me localities interesting from their historical
or traditional associations, or connected in some way with humorous or
pathetic passages of his own life experience. Some of these
autobiographical fragments affected me deeply. In narrating them he
invested familiar and commonplace facts with something of the
fascination of romance. "Human life," he would say, "is the same

everywhere. If we could but get at the truth, we should find that all the
tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare have been reproduced in this little
village. God has made all of one blood; what is true of one man is in
some sort true of another; manifestations may differ, but the essential
elements and spring of action are the same. On the surface, everything
about us just now looks prosaic and mechanical; you see only a sort of
bark-mill grinding over of the same dull, monotonous grist of daily
trifles. But underneath all this there is an earnest life, rich and beautiful
with love and hope, or dark with hatred, and sorrow, and remorse. That
fisherman by the riverside, or that woman at the stream below, with her
wash-tub,--who knows what lights and shadows checker their
memories, or what present thoughts of theirs, born of heaven or hell,
the future shall ripen into deeds of good or evil? Ah, what have I not
seen and heard? My profession has been to me, in some sort, like the
vial genie of the Salamanca student; it has unroofed these houses, and
opened deep, dark chambers to the hearts of their tenants, which no eye
save that of God had ever looked upon. Where I least expected them, I
have encountered shapes of evil; while, on the other hand, I have found
beautiful, heroic love and self-denial in those who had seemed to me
frivolous and selfish."
So would Dr. Singletary discourse as we strolled over Blueberry Hill,
or drove along the narrow willow-shaded road which follows the
windings of the river. He had read and thought much in his retired,
solitary life, and was evidently well satisfied to find in me a gratified
listener. He talked well and fluently, with little regard to logical
sequence, and with something of the dogmatism natural to one whose
opinions had seldom been subjected to scrutiny. He seemed equally at
home in the most abstruse questions of theology and metaphysics, and
in the more practical matters of mackerel-fishing, corn-growing, and
cattle-raising. It was manifest that to his book lore he had added that
patient and close observation of the processes of Nature which often
places the unlettered ploughman and mechanic on a higher level of
available intelligence than that occupied by professors and school men.
To him nothing which had its root in the eternal verities of Nature was
"common or unclean." The blacksmith, subjecting to his will the swart
genii of the mines of coal and iron; the potter, with his "power over the
clay;" the skipper, who had tossed in his frail fishing-smack among the

icebergs of Labrador; the farmer, who had won from Nature the occult
secrets of her woods and fields; and even the vagabond hunter and
angler, familiar with the habits of animals and the migration of birds
and fishes,--had been his instructors; and he was not ashamed to
acknowledge that they had taught him more than college or library.

CHAPTER III
.
THE DOCTOR'S MATCH-MAKING.