“I’ve left it all with the Lord.”

“You’d have done better,” said the Doctor, “to keep it yourself.  Trouble is for your discipline:  the Lord doesn’t need it.”

It was thus out of his wisdom that he was always telling people what they knew, deep down in their hearts, to be true.  It sometimes hurt at first, but sooner or later, if the man had a spark of real manhood in him, he came back, and gave the Doctor an abiding affection.

There were those who, though they loved him, called him intolerant.  I never could look at it that way.  He did have the only kind of intolerance which is at all tolerable, and that is the intolerance of intolerance.  He always set himself with vigour against that unreason and lack of sympathy which are the essence of intolerance; and yet there was a rock of conviction on many subjects behind which he could not be driven.  It was not intolerance:  it was with him a reasoned certainty of belief.  He had a phrase to express that not uncommon state of mind in this age particularly, which is politely willing to yield its foothold within this universe to almost any reasoner who suggests some other universe, however shadowy, to stand upon.  He called it a “mush of concession.”  He might have been wrong in his convictions, but he, at least, never floundered in a “mush of concession.”  I heard him say once: 

“There are some things a man can’t concede, and one is, that a man who has broken a law, like a man who has broken a leg, has got to suffer for it.”

It was only with the greatest difficulty that he could be prevailed upon to present a bill.  It was not because the community was poor, though some of our people are poor, and it was certainly not because the Doctor was rich and could afford such philanthropy, for, saving a rather unproductive farm which during the last ten years of his life lay wholly uncultivated, he was as poor as any man in the community.  He simply seemed to forget that people owed him.

It came to be a common and humorous experience for people to go to the Doctor and say: 

“Now, Doctor North, how much do I owe you?  You remember you attended my wife two years ago when the baby came—­and John when he had the diphtheria——­”

“Yes, yes,” said the Doctor, “I remember.”

“I thought I ought to pay you.”

“Well, I’ll look it up when I get time.”

But he wouldn’t.  The only way was to go to him and say: 

“Doctor, I want to pay ten dollars on account.”

“All right,” he’d answer, and take the money.

To the credit of the community I may say with truthfulness that the Doctor never suffered.  He was even able to supply himself with the best instruments that money could buy.  To him nothing was too good for our neighbourhood.  This morning I saw in a case at his home a complete set of oculist’s instruments, said to be the best in the county—­a very unusual equipment for a country doctor.  Indeed,