woman just the other day, when she had an ear-ache, 'Ain't got small-pox, have yuh, Bess!'"
Dr. Hesselink said:
"Doctor, what's this I hear? You're not going away? Why, you and I were just beginning to bring medical practise in this neck of the woods up to where it ought to be, so I drove over to-night— Huh? We panned you? Ye-es, I suppose we did, but that doesn't mean we didn't appreciate you. Small place like here or Groningen, you have to roast your neighbors to keep busy. Why, Doctor, I've been watching you develop from an unlicked cub to a real upstanding physician, and now you're going away—you don't know how I feel!"
Henry Novak said:
"Why, Doc, you ain't going to leave us? And we got a new baby coming, and I said to the woman, just the other day, 'It's a good thing we got a doctor that hands you out the truth and not all this guff we used to get from Doc Winter.'"
The wheat-buyer at Delft said:
"Doc, what's this I hear? You ain't going away? A fellow told me you was and I says to him, 'Don't be more of a damn' fool than the Lord meant you to be,' I says. But I got to worrying about it, and I drove over and— Doc, I fire off my mouth pretty easy, I guess. I was agin you in the typhoid epidemic, when you said that seamstress was carrying the sickness around, and then you showed me up good. Doc, if you'd like to be state senator, and if you'll stay—I got quite a little influence—believe me, I'll get out and work my shirt off for you!"
Alec Ingleblad said:
"You're a lucky guy!"
All the village was at the train when they left for Nautilus.
For a hundred autumn-blazing miles Martin mourned his neighbors. "I feel like getting off and going back. Didn't we used to have fun playing Five Hundred with the Fraziers! I hate to think of the kind of doctor they may get. I swear, if some quack settles there or if Woestijne neglects the health work again, I'll go back and run 'em both out of business! And be kind of fun to be state senator, some ways."
But as evening thickened and nothing in all the rushing world existed save the yellow Pinsch gas globes above them in the long car, they saw ahead of them great Nautilus, high honor and achievement, the making of a radiant model city, and the praise of Sondelius—perhaps even of Max Gottlieb.
