It was at lunch that the Vagabond fell in with the country doctor. This member of the most noble branch of a noble calling had just finished a call and was about to go off on another, but he spared the moment for a bit of light talk. It seemed that his father had died when he was two, leaving his mother with several worldly children and a few ethereal dividends. There followed for him the public schools with their trials and tribulations, until in his senior year he saw, through the gloom of adolescent disinterestedness, the gleam of his future profession. It was all he had to his name--this desire for science. But it led him to the state university and on into Medical School. To make money he tutored in the winter; caddied, waited on table, managed a restaurant in the summer. At term time he slept four hours a night, in the vacations he sometimes never slept at all. And in the end he got his diploma. "But it was not," he said," a heroic business. It was dirty, and stinking, and sweaty, and I hated it. Anyone could do it, and I advise no one to try."

Now he operates every day, delivers babies in small kitchens on the same table where potatoes have been peeled that morning, walks through a slashing to a hutch for an appendicitis operation, is called from bed to diagnose a belly ache, is kept from bed by a broken arm. He still gets about four hours of sleep a night and in the mornings the knives sometimes tremble in his hands. He smokes too many cigarettes. This again is not heroic. People are sick and people are poor and other people take care of them. This, too, is stinking and sweaty. And yet in the town shopmen call him "Doc" and slip an extra carton of cigarettes in his box of provisions. In mud time when the Ford slips into a pot hole, a team is hitched on to the front "ax" and the farmer forgets to ask for his three dollars. It really is not very understandable.