The Doctor's Christmas Eve by James Lane Allen

Author:James Lane Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620135884
Publisher: Duke Classics

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And now eight years followed, during which the youth Downs Birney became young Dr. Birney—a very great stage of actual progress. Seven away from Kentucky, and one there since his return. Of those seven, five in New York for a degree; and two in Europe—in Berlin, in Vienna—for more lectures, more hospital work, another degree. At the end of the second he returned incredibly developed to Kentucky, to the manor house and the stock farm; and to the uncle to whom these years had furnished abundance of means whereby to get the best of all that was wisely to be gotten: an affectionate abundance, no overfond super-abundance, no sentimentality: merely a quiet Kentucky sun throwing the energy of its rays along that young life-track—hanging out a purse of gold at each quarter-stretch, to be snatched as the thoroughbred passed.

A return home then to a neighborhood of kinships and friendships and to the uphill work which could so easily become downhill sliding—the practice of medicine among a people where during these absences he had been remembered, if remembered at all, as the wildest youth in the country. When it had been learned what profession he had chosen, the prediction had been made that within a year Downs would reduce the mortality of the neighborhood to normal—one to every inhabitant!

But at the end of this first year of undertaking to convert ridicule into acceptance of himself as a stable health officer and confidential health guardian, he was able to say that he had made a good start: neighbors have long memories about a budding physician's first cases—when he fails. Young Dr. Birney had not failed, because none of his cases had been important: when there was danger, it was considered safe to avoid the doctor: the only way in which he could have lost a patient would have been to murder one! Thus he had entered auspiciously upon the long art and science of securing patients. But he had secured no wife! And he greatly preferred one impossible wife to all possible patients. That problem meantime had been pressing him sorely.

The womanless house in which he had been reared and his boyhood on a stock farm had rendered him rather shy of girls and kept him much apart from the society of the neighborhood. Nevertheless even in Europe before his return—with the certainty of marriage before him—he had recalled two or three juvenile perturbations, and he had resolved upon arrival to follow these clues and ascertain what changes seven years had wrought in them. There was no difficulty in following the clues a few weeks after getting back to Kentucky: they led in each case to the door of a growing young family: and out of these households he thereupon began to receive calls for his services to sick children: all the perturbations had become volcanoes, and were now on their way to become extinct craters.

So he was clueless. He must make his own clues and then follow. Nor could there be

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