“A few months afterward, as I lay in my bed too weak even to stir, your father stood there, looking across the footboard at me,—­the answer to that letter.  Your father, tall and strong of body and brain, a Harvard graduate drawn to New York to study medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons.  His eyes of strengthening manly pity looked into mine and drew me slowly back to life with them.

“His long absence as surgeon in the Civil War, the settling down as a country doctor, and even loving the same woman, has not separated us.  Never more than a few months passed but our thoughts met on paper, or our hands clasped.  His solicitude in a large measure restored my health, so that at sixty-three, physically, I can hold my own with any man of my age, and to-day I walk my ten miles with less ado than many younger men.  Because of my intense dislike of the modern means of street transportation, I have kept on walking ever since the time that your father and I footed it from Washington Park to Van Cortlandt Manor, through the muskrat marshes whereon the park plaza now stands, up through the wilds of the future Central Park, McGowan’s Pass, and northwestward across the Harlem to our destination.  He will recollect.  We were two days picking our way in going and two days on the return, for we scorned the ’bus route, and that was only in the later fifties.  Never mind, if we ever do get back to small clothes and silk stockings, Martin Cortright can show a rounded calf, if he has been esteemed little more than a crawling bookworm these many years.

“Methinks I hear you yawn and crumple these sheets together in your hand, saying:  ’What ails the man—­is he grown doity?  I thought he was contented, even if sluggishly serene.’

“And so he was, as one grown used to numbness, until last summer one Mistress Barbara visited the man-snail in his shell and exorcised him to come forth for an outing, to feed among fresh green leaves and breathe the perfume of flowers and young lives.  When lo and behold, on the snail’s return, the shell had grown too small!

“Faithfully,

“M.  C.”

* * * * *

(To R. R.)

“December 22, 19—.

“So social change has also cast its shadow across even your country pathway, dear Hippocrates?  I wish it had spared you, but I feared as much when I heard that your peaceful town had been invaded by an advance guard of those same People of the Whirlpool who keep the social life of their own city in a ferment.

“You ask what is the matter, what the cause of the increasing restlessness that appears on every side, driving the conservative thinking class of moderate means to seek home shelter beyond city limits, and drawing the rest into a swirl that, sooner or later, either casts them forth as wrecks or sucks them wholly down.