Abel Stebbins, the Doctor’s man, took the true American view of his difficult position.  He sold his time to the Doctor, and, having sold it, he took care to fulfil his half of the bargain.  The Doctor, on his part, treated him, not like a gentleman, because one does not order a gentleman to bring up his horse or run his errands, but he treated him like a man.  Every order was given in courteous terms.  His reasonable privileges were respected as much as if they had been guaranteed under hand and seal.  The Doctor lent him books from his own library, and gave him all friendly counsel, as if he were a son or a younger brother.

Abel had Revolutionary blood in his veins, and though he saw fit to “hire out,” he could never stand the word “servant,” or consider himself the inferior one of the two high contracting parties.  When he came to live with the Doctor, he made up his mind he would dismiss the old gentleman, if he did not behave according to his notions of propriety.  But he soon found that the Doctor was one of the right sort, and so determined to keep him.  The Doctor soon found, on his side, that he had a trustworthy, intelligent fellow, who would be invaluable to him, if he only let him have his own way of doing what was to be done.

The Doctor’s hired man had not the manners of a French valet.  He was grave and taciturn for the most part, he never bowed and rarely smiled, but was always at work in the daytime, and always reading in the evening.  He was hostler, and did all the housework that a man could properly do, would go to the door or “tend table,” bought the provisions for the family,—­in short, did almost everything for them but get their clothing.  There was no office in a perfectly appointed household, from that of steward down to that of stable-boy, which he did not cheerfully assume.  His round of work not consuming all his energies, he must needs cultivate the Doctor’s garden, which he kept in one perpetual bloom, from the blowing of the first crocus to the fading of the last dahlia.

This garden was Abel’s poem.  Its half-dozen beds were so many cantos.  Nature crowded them for him with imagery such as no Laureate could copy in the cold mosaic of language.  The rhythm of alternating dawn and sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible through all the sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed in corresponding floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel, the plain serving-man.  It softened his whole otherwise rigid aspect.  He worshipped God according to the strict way of his fathers; but a florist’s Puritanism is always colored by the petals of his flowers,—­and Nature never shows him a black corolla.

He may or may not figure again in this narrative; but as there must be some who confound the New England hired man, native-born, with the servant of foreign birth, and as there is the difference of two continents and two civilizations between them, it did not seem fair to let Abel bring round the Doctor’s mare and sulky without touching his features in half-shadow into our background.