My Summer with Dr. Singletary: A Fragment Chapter I.
by John Greenleaf Whittier
Dr. Singletary is dead!
Well, what of it? All who live die sooner or later; and pray who was
Dr. Singletary, that his case should claim particular attention?
Why, in the first place, Dr. Singletary, as a man born to our common
inheritance of joy and sorrow, earthly instincts and heavenward
aspirations,--our brother in sin and suffering, wisdom and folly, love,
and pride, and vanity,--has a claim upon the universal sympathy.
Besides, whatever the living man may have been, death has now invested
him with its great solemnity. He is with the immortals. For him the
dark curtain has been lifted. The weaknesses, the follies, and the
repulsive mental and personal idiosyncrasies which may have kept him
without the sphere of our respect and sympathy have now fallen off, and
he stands radiant with the transfiguration of eternity, God's child, our
recognized and acknowledged brother.
Dr. Singletary is dead. He was an old man, and seldom, of latter years,
ventured beyond the precincts of his neighborhood. He was a single man,
and his departure has broken no circle of family affection. He was
little known to the public, and is now little missed. The village
newspaper simply appended to its announcement of his decease the
customary post mortem compliment, "Greatly respected by all who knew
him;" and in the annual catalogue of his alma mater an asterisk has been
added to his name, over which perchance some gray-haired survivor of his
class may breathe a sigh, as he calls up, the image of the fresh-faced,
bright-eyed boy, who, aspiring, hopeful, vigorous, started with him on
the journey of life,--a sigh rather for himself than for its unconscious
awakener.
But, a few years have passed since he left us; yet already wellnigh all
the outward manifestations, landmarks, and memorials of the living man
have passed away or been removed. His house, with its broad, mossy roof
sloping down on one side almost to the rose-bushes and lilacs, and with
its comfortable little porch in front, where he used to sit of a
pleasant summer afternoon, has passed into new hands, and has been sadly
disfigured by a glaring coat of white paint; and in the place of the
good Doctor's name, hardly legible on the corner-board, may now be seen,
in staring letters of black and gold, "VALENTINE ORSON STUBBS, M. D.,
Indian doctor and dealer in roots and herbs." The good Doctor's old
horse, as well known as its owner to every man, woman, and child in the
village, has fallen into the new comer's hands, who (being prepared to
make the most of him, from the fact that he commenced the practice of
the healing art in the stable, rising from thence to the parlor) has
rubbed him into comparative sleekness, cleaned his mane and tail of the
accumulated burrs of many autumns, and made quite a gay nag of him. The
wagon, too, in which at least two generations of boys and girls have
ridden in noisy hilarity whenever they encountered it on their way to
school, has been so smartly painted and varnished, that if its former
owner could look down from the hill-slope where he lies, he would
scarcely know his once familiar vehicle as it whirls glittering along
the main road to the village. For the rest, all things go on as usual;
the miller grinds, the blacksmith strikes and blows, the cobbler and
tailor stitch and mend, old men sit in the autumn sun, old gossips stir
tea and scandal, revival meetings alternate with apple-bees and
bushings,--toil, pleasure, family jars, petty neighborhood quarrels,
courtship, and marriage,--all which make up the daily life of a country
village continue as before. The little chasm which his death has made
in the hearts of the people where he lived and labored seems nearly
closed up. There is only one more grave in the burying-ground,--that is
all.
Let nobody infer from what I have said that the good man died
unlamented; for, indeed, it was a sad day with his neighbors when the
news, long expected, ran at last from house to house and from workshop
to workshop, "Dr. Singletary is dead!"
He had not any enemy left among them; in one way or another he had been
the friend and benefactor of all. Some owed to his skill their recovery
from sickness; others remembered how he had watched with anxious
solicitude by the bedside of their dying relatives, soothing them, when
all human aid was vain, with the sweet consolations of that Christian
hope which alone pierces the great shadow of the grave and shows the
safe stepping-stones above the dark waters. The old missed a cheerful
companion and friend, who had taught them much without wounding their
pride by an offensive display of his superiority, and who, while making
a jest of his own trials and infirmities, could still listen with real
sympathy to the querulous and importunate complaints of others. For one
day, at least, even the sunny faces of childhood were marked with
unwonted thoughtfulness; the shadow of the common bereavement fell over
the play-ground and nursery. The little girl remembered, with tears,
how her broken-limbed doll had taxed the surgical ingenuity of her
genial old friend; and the boy showed sorrowfully to his playmates the
top which the good Doctor had given him. If there were few, among the
many who stood beside his grave, capable of rightly measuring and
appreciating the high intellectual and spiritual nature which formed the
background of his simple social life, all could feel that no common loss
had been sustained, and that the kindly and generous spirit which had
passed away from them had not lived to himself alone.
As you follow the windings of one of the loveliest rivers of New
England, a few miles above the sea-mart, at its mouth, you can see on a
hill, whose grassy slope is checkered with the graceful foliage of the
locust, and whose top stands relieved against a still higher elevation,
dark with oaks and walnuts, the white stones of the burying-place. It
is a quiet spot, but without gloom, as befits "God's Acre." Below is
the village, with its sloops and fishing-boats at the wharves, and its
crescent of white houses mirrored in the water. Eastward is the misty
line of the great sea. Blue peaks of distant mountains roughen the
horizon of the north. Westward, the broad, clear river winds away into
a maze of jutting bluffs and picturesque wooded headlands. The tall,
white stone on the westerly slope of the hill bears the name of
"Nicholas Singletary, M. D.," and marks the spot which he selected many
years before his death. When I visited it last spring, the air about it
was fragrant with the bloom of sweet-brier and blackberry and the
balsamic aroma of the sweet-fern; birds were singing in the birch-trees
by the wall; and two little, brown-locked, merry-faced girls were making
wreaths of the dandelions and grasses which grew upon the old man's
grave. The sun was setting behind the western river-bluffs, flooding
the valley with soft light, glorifying every object and fusing all into
harmony and beauty. I saw and felt nothing to depress or sadden me. I
could have joined in the laugh of the children. The light whistle of a
young teamster, driving merrily homeward, did not jar upon my ear; for
from the transfigured landscape, and from the singing birds, and from
sportive childhood, and from blossoming sweetbrier, and from the grassy
mound before me, I heard the whisper of one word only, and that word
was PEACE.
