In due time the doctor came—­and I never quite forgave him for not making me wait and go back with him.  He was too sleepy, though, I am sure.  The seizure was apparently nothing which could not have waited until morning.  However, he left some new cure, possibly clear water in a bottle, and left again.  But the night trials of doctors and their patients, especially in the country, was fixed in my mind then.

One of the next interesting impressions I gained of the doctor was that of seeing him hobbling about our town on crutches, his medicine case held in one hand along with a crutch, visiting his patients, when he himself appeared to be so ill as to require medical attention.  He was suffering from some severe form of rheumatism at the time, but this, apparently, was not sufficient to keep him from those who in his judgment probably needed his services more than he did his rest.

One of the truly interesting things about Dr. Gridley, as I early began to note, was his profound indifference to what might be called his material welfare.  Why, I have often asked myself, should a man of so much genuine ability choose to ignore the gauds and plaudits and pleasures of the gayer, smarter world outside, in which he might readily have shone, to thus devote himself and all his talents to a simple rural community?  That he was an extremely able physician there was not the slightest doubt.  Other physicians from other towns about, and even so far away as Chicago, were repeatedly calling him into consultation.  That he knew life—­much of it—­as only a priest or a doctor of true wisdom can know it, was evident from many incidents, of which I subsequently learned, and yet here he was, hidden away in this simple rural world, surrounded probably by his Rabelais, his Burton, his Frazer, and his Montaigne, and dreaming what dreams—­thinking what thoughts?

“Say,” an old patient, friend and neighbor of his once remarked to me years later, when we had both moved to another city, “one of the sweetest recollections of my life is to picture old Dr. Gridley, Ed Boulder who used to run the hotel over at Sleichertown, Congressman Barr, and Judge Morgan, sitting out in front of Boulder’s hotel over there of a summer’s evening and haw-hawing over the funny stories which Boulder was always telling while they were waiting for the Pierceton bus.  Dr. Gridley’s laugh, so soft to begin with, but growing in force and volume until it was a jolly shout.  And the green fields all around.  And Mrs. Calder’s drove of geese over the way honking, too, as geese will whenever people begin to talk or laugh.  It was delicious.”

One of the most significant traits of his character, as may be inferred, was his absolute indifference to actual money, the very cash, one would think, with which he needed to buy his own supplies.  During his life, his wife, who was a thrifty, hard-working woman, used frequently, as I learned after, to comment on this, but to no result.  He could not be made to charge where he did not need to, nor collect where he knew that the people were poor.