in it?” He turned back a step or two, and stooped for the little white speck.  One corner of it was nestled under a stone.  It was a ragged, rumpled, muddy fragment of a letter, or an essay, which rain and wind and water had done their best to annihilate, and finally, seeming to become weary of their plaything, had tossed it contemptuously on the shore, and a pitying stone had rolled down and covered and preserved a tiny corner.  Dr. Douglass eyed it curiously, trying to decipher the mud-stained lines, and being in a dreamy mood wondered meanwhile what young, fair hand had penned the words, and what of joy or sadness filled them.  Scarcely a word was readable, at least nothing that would gratify his curiosity, until he turned the bit of leaf, and the first line, which the stone had hidden, shone out distinctly:  “Sometimes I can not help asking myself why I was made—.”  Here the corner was torn off, and whether that was the end of the original sentence or not, it was the end to him.  God sometimes uses very simple means with which to confound the wisdom of this world.  Such a sudden and extraordinary revulsion of feeling as swept over Dr. Douglass he had never dreamed of before.  He did not stop to question the strangeness of his state of mind, nor why that bit of soiled, torn paper should possess so fearful a power over him.  He did not even realize at the moment that it was connected with this bewilderment, he only knew that the foundation upon which he had been building for years seemed suddenly to have been torn from under him by invisible hands, and left his feet sinking slowly down on nothing; and his inmost soul took suddenly up that solemn question with which he had never before troubled his logical brain:  “I can not help asking myself why I was made?” There was only one other readable word on that paper, turn it whichever way he would, and that word was “God;” and he started and shivered when his eye met this, as if some awful voice had spoken it to his ear.

“What unaccountable witchcraft has taken possession of me?” he muttered, at length.  And turning suddenly he sat himself down on an old decaying log by the river side, and gave himself up to real, honest, solemn thought.

“Where is Dr. Douglass?” queried Julia, appearing at the dining-room door just at tea time.  “There is a boy at the door says they want him at Judge Beldon’s this very instant.”

“He’s nowhere” answered Sadie solemnly, pausing in the work of arranging cups and saucers.  “It’s my private opinion that he has been and gone and hung himself.  He passed the window about one o’clock, looking precisely as I should suppose a man would who was about to commit that interesting act, since which time I’ve answered the bell seventeen times to give the same melancholy story of his whereabouts.”

“My!” exclaimed the literal Julia, hurrying back to the boy at the door.  She comprehended her sister sufficiently to have no faith in the hanging statement, but honestly believed in the seventeen sick people who were waiting for the doctor.