“‘Yes, yes,’ he answered me sadly, but now with an implication which could by no means be misunderstood, ’it is nearly always so.  The failure is in the recuperative energy.  Vitality runs too low.’  It meant from the first, ‘Your father will not live.’”

In the case of a little child with meningitis, the same person was sent to him to ask what of the child—­better or worse.  His answer was:  “He is passing as free from pain as ever I knew a case of this kind.”

In yet another case of a dying woman, one of her relatives inquired:  “Doctor, is this case dangerous?” “Not in the nature of the malady, madam,” was his sad and sympathetic reply, “but fatal in the condition it meets.  Hope is broken.  There is nothing to resist the damage.”

One of his patients was a farmer who lived in an old-time log house a few miles out from Silver Lake, who while working about his barn met with a very serious accident which involved a possible injury to the gall bladder.  The main accident was not in itself fatal, but the possible injury to the gall bladder was, and this, if it existed, would show as a yellow tint in the eyeball on the tenth day.  Fearing the danger of this, he communicated the possibility to the relatives, saying that he could do little after that time but that he would come just the same and make the patient as comfortable as possible.  For nine days he came, sitting by the bedside and whiling away many a weary hour for the sufferer, until the tenth morning.  On this day, according to his daughter, who had it from the sick man’s relatives, his face but ill concealed the anxiety he felt.  Coming up to the door, he entered just far enough to pretend to reach for a water bucket.  With this in his hand he turned and gave one long keen look in the eye of the sick man, then walked down the yard to a chair under a tree some distance from the house, where he sat, drooping and apparently grieved, the certainty of the death of the patient affecting him as much as if he were his own child.

“There was no need for words,” said one of them.  “Every curve and droop of his figure, as he walked slowly and with bent head, told all of us who saw him that hope was gone and that death had won the victory.”

One of his perpetual charges, as I learned later, was a poor old unfortunate by the name of Id Logan, who had a little cabin and an acre of ground a half dozen miles west of Warsaw, and who existed from year to year heaven only knows how.

Id never had any money, friends or relatives, and was always troubled with illness or hunger in some form or other, and yet the doctor always spoke of him sympathetically as “Poor old Id Logan” and would often call out there on his rounds to see how he was getting along.  One snowy winter’s evening as he was traveling homeward after a long day’s ride, he chanced to recollect the fact that he was in the neighborhood of his worthless old charge, and fancying that he might be in need of something turned