Here and there, on a winter night, one
saw the light in a farm house, distant and dim.
Over it all was a great silence such as people who live
in the cities can never know.
And on us, as on the other families of that lonely
countryside, there sometimes fell the sudden alarm of
illness, and the hurrying drive through the snow at night
to fetch the doctor from the village, seven miles away.
My elder brother and I--there was a long tribe of us, as
with all country families--would hitch up the horse by
the light of the stable lantern, eager with haste and
sick with fear, counting the time till the doctor could
be there.
Then out into the driving snow, urging the horse that
knew by instinct that something was amiss, and so mile
after mile, till we rounded the corner into the single
street of the silent village.
Late, late at night it was--eleven o'clock, perhaps--and
the village dark and deep in sleep, except where the
light showed red against the blinds of the "Surgery" of
the doctor's rough-cast house behind the spruce trees.
"Doctor," we cried, as we burst in, "hurry and come.
Jim's ill--"
I can see him still as he sat there in his surgery, the
burly doctor, rugged and strong for all the sixty winters
that he carried.
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