A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 534 pages of information about A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches.

A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 534 pages of information about A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches.

“They begun to call us heroes an’ old stick-in-the-mud just about the same time,” resumed Stover, with a chuckle.  “We wa’n’t no hand for strippin’ woodland nor even tradin’ hosses them first few years.  I don’ know why ’twas we were so beat out.  The best most on us could do was to sag right on to the old folks.  Father he never wanted me to go to the war,—­’twas partly his Quaker breed,—­an’ he used to be dreadful mortified with the way I hung round down here to the store an’ loafed round a-talkin’ about when I was out South, an’ arguin’ with folks that didn’t know nothin’, about what the generals done.  There!  I see me now just as he see me then; but after I had my boy-strut out, I took holt o’ the old farm ‘long o’ father, an’ I’ve made it bounce.  Look at them old meadows an’ see the herd’s grass that come off of ’em last year!  I ain’t ashamed o’ my place now, if I did go to the war.”

“It all looks a sight bigger to me now than it did then,” said Henry Merrill.  “Our goin’ to the war, I refer to.  We didn’t sense it no more than other folks did.  I used to be sick o’ hearin’ their stuff about patriotism and lovin’ your country, an’ them pieces o’ poetry women folks wrote for the papers on the old flag, an’ our fallen heroes, an’ them things; they didn’t seem to strike me in the right place; but I tell ye it kind o’ starts me now every time I come on the flag sudden,—­it does so.  A spell ago—­’long in the fall, I guess it was—­I was over to Alton, an’ there was a fire company paradin’.  They’d got the prize at a fair, an’ had just come home on the cars, an’ I heard the band; so I stepped to the front o’ the store where me an’ my woman was tradin’, an’ the company felt well, an’ was comin’ along the street ‘most as good as troops.  I see the old flag a-comin’, kind of blowin’ back, an’ it went all over me.  Somethin’ worked round in my throat; I vow I come near cryin’.  I was glad nobody see me.”

“I’d go to war again in a minute,” declared Stover, after an expressive pause; “but I expect we should know better what we was about.  I don’ know but we’ve got too many rooted opinions now to make us the best o’ soldiers.”

“Martin Tighe an’ John Tighe was considerable older than the rest, and they done well,” answered Henry Merrill quickly.  “We three was the youngest of any, but we did think at the time we knew the most.”

“Well, whatever you may say, that war give the country a great start,” said Asa Brown.  “I tell ye we just begin to see the scope on’t.  There was my cousin, you know, Dan’l Evins, that stopped with us last winter; he was tellin’ me that one o’ his coastin’ trips he was into the port o’ Beaufort lo’din’ with yaller-pine lumber, an’ he roved into an old buryin’-ground there is there, an’ he see a stone that had on it some young Southern fellow’s name that was killed in the war, an’ under it was, ‘He died for his country.’  Dan’l knowed how I used to feel about them South Car’lina goings on, an’ I did feel kind o’ red an’ ugly for a minute, an’ then somethin’ come over me, an’ I says, ‘Well, I don’ know but what the poor chap did, Dan Evins, when you come to view it all round.’”

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A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.