You want to know all about dear Dr. Butts.  They say he has just been offered a Professorship in one of the great medical colleges.  I asked him about it, and he did not say that he had or had not.  “But,” said be, “suppose that I had been offered such a place; do you think I ought to accept it and leave Arrowhead Village?  Let us talk it over,” said he, “just as if I had had such an offer.”  I told him he ought to stay.  There are plenty of men that can get into a Professor’s chair, I said, and talk like Solomons to a class of wondering pupils:  but once get a really good doctor in a place, a man who knows all about everybody, whether they have this or that tendency, whether when they are sick they have a way of dying or a way of getting well, what medicines agree with them and what drugs they cannot take, whether they are of the sort that think nothing is the matter with them until they are dead as smoked herring, or of the sort that send for the minister if they get a stomach-ache from eating too many cucumbers,—­who knows all about all the people within half a dozen miles (all the sensible ones, that is, who employ a regular practitioner),—­such a man as that, I say, is not to be replaced like a missing piece out of a Springfield musket or a Waltham watch.  Don’t go! said I. Stay here and save our precious lives, if you can, or at least put us through in the proper way, so that we needn’t be ashamed of ourselves for dying, if we must die.  Well, Dr. Butts is not going to leave us.  I hope you will have no unwelcome occasion for his services,—­you are never ill, you know,—­but, anyhow, he is going to be here, and no matter what happens he will be on hand.

The village news is not of a very exciting character.  Item 1.  A new house is put up over the ashes of the one in which your husband lived while he was here.  It was planned by one of the autochthonous inhabitants with the most ingenious combination of inconveniences that the natural man could educe from his original perversity of intellect.  To get at any one room you must pass through every other.  It is blind, or nearly so, on the only side which has a good prospect, and commands a fine view of the barn and pigsty through numerous windows.  Item 2.  We have a small fire-engine near the new house which can be worked by a man or two, and would be equal to the emergency of putting out a bunch of fire-crackers.  Item 3.  We have a new ladder, in a bog, close to the new fire-engine, so if the new house catches fire, like its predecessor, and there should happen to, be a sick man on an upper floor, he can be got out without running the risk of going up and down a burning staircase.  What a blessed thing it was that there was no fire-engine near by and no ladder at hand on the day of the great rescue!  If there had been, what a change in your programme of life!  You remember that “cup of tea spilt on Mrs. Masham’s apron,” which we used to read of in one of Everett’s Orations, and all its