THE DOCTOR: AN OLD VIRGINIA FOX-HUNTER. No; Now the Doctor was a Southerner of the old school. Nor was he merely a North Carolinan, a Tennessean, a Kentuckian, or a Georgian-not any, thank you! our friend was a Virginian-a real old-fashioned, blue-blooded, whole-souled, open-handed Virginian." And this he was by virtue of eight or nine generations of forebears who had fought, physicked, speechified, fox-hunted, raised negroes and tobacco, in that immortal commonwealth. No day passed but the Doctor, in his simple fashion, unconsciously thanked God that he was a Virginian. For did not virtue, valour, honour, gallantry select the Old Dominion in the days of the Stuarts as their special depot, from whence, in modified streams, these qualities might be diffused over the less fortunate portions of the Western world? To the unsophisticated Englishman, to the ignorant Frenchman or German, an American is an American. If he is not rampantly modern, sensationally progressive, and furiously material, he is nothing at all. But the Doctor would scarcely ever speak or think of himself as an American, except in the same sense as an English man would call himself a European. The Doctor was every moment of the day, and every day in the year, a Virginian above everything; and as I have already said, he felt thereby that a responsibility and a glory above that of other mortals had been conferred upon him by the accident of his birth. I may add, moreover, that he was unquestionably non-progressive, that he was decidedly not modern, while to this day he is so reactionary that the sound of a rail way irritates him; and finally, that he was, and I feel sure still is, eminently picturesque. The Doctor was about sixty-five at the time of which I write (not so very many years ago). He had never set foot outside Virginia, and never wanted to. That a country, however, or climate, or people, or scenery existed that could be mentioned in the same breath with the old Cavalier colony, never for one moment was accounted within the bounds of possibility by that good and simple soul. And yet, paradoxical as it may seem, the Doctor was proud of his descent from pure English stock. "None of Scotch or Irish, or Scotch-Irish, for me. No, I thank you, sir." "My folks," he was fond of relating, were real English stock, who came over 'way back in early colonial days, and settled on the York River. They were kin to the nobility." Whatever may have been the accuracy of this last claim, the Doctor's patronymic in Virginia genealogy was above reproach, and would have secured him an entrée (had he owned a dress-coat, and had he felt a hankering after Eastern cities) into those small exclusive coteries in transatlantic society that still recognise birth as superior to wealth and even intellect. I should not like it to be supposed that my dear Doctor, of whom I am excessively fond, was given to blustering about either his State or his descent. Your fire-eating, blowing, swaggering Southerner belongs either to a lower social grade, to the more frontier States of the South, or, to a greater degree perhaps than either, to the fertile imagination of Yankee edi tors and dime novelists. The hard to distinguish him from the Doctor was a Virginian. His native. To picture the Doctor in thoughts and his habits, which London, however, requires an effort were peculiar and original, were of imagination from which the insimply those of Virginians of his tellect shrinks. Of one thing I class and generation somewhat am sure, and that is, he would be strongly emphasised. He was very miserable. He would call in just and unassuming, kindly and vain for glasses of cold water like homely. There was about him a that from the limpid spring under delightful old-fashioned, if some- the poplar-tree at home, of which what ponderous suavity of man- the Doctor consumes about a horsener, that the rest of the Anglo- troughful a-day. He would hang Saxon race have long, long out over the apple-stalls, and groan grown. To even hear a married over the deficiencies of a country female that was not black ad- that could do no better than that. dressed as otherwise than "Ma- He would get up two hours before dam" positively pained him. As the servants, and prowl about disfor the children, the Doctor had a consolate and hungry till breakseparate greeting for every one of fast. What an apology, too, for a them, let his host's quiver be ever breakfast it would be without an so full. Ay, and generally some- "old Virginia hot-beat biscuit"! thing more than that; for the In his despair of getting a “julep,” Doctor's capacious pockets were he might take a whisky-punch beknown by the little ones to be fore his early dinner. But here, almost as inexhaustible in the again, how could the emblazoned way of chincapins, hickory-nuts, wine-card, with its, for him, meanand candy, as his well-worn saddle- ingless contents, supply the want bags were of less inviting condi- of that big pitcher of foaming buttermilk for which his simple palate craves? The pomp and wealth, the glitter and glare of a great capital, would be simply distasteful to our patriarch. In his own land he and his have been for all time aristocrats—after their own fashion, it is true, but still aristocrats. They have been strongly inclined to regard themselves as the salt of the earthand perhaps they are: a good sturdy British foible this, intensified by isolation and the mutualadmiration atmosphere which such isolation creates. At any rate, gold lace and liveries and coronets are not indispensable adjuncts of honour and breeding. The Doctor, however if we can imagine him gazing on the stream of carriages rolling past Hyde Park Corner on a summer evening— would be sensible, for the first time ments. The Doctor's belief in his country (and by his country of course I mean Virginia) was the religion in which he was born. He would never have dreamt of intruding it on you. International comparisons he could not make, for he had never been out of the State. I feel perfectly sure, however, if the Doctor had travelled over every corner of the earth, that his faith was of that fundamental description which was proof against mere sights and sounds. He would have returned to the shade of his ancestral porch, temporarily staggered, perhaps, but still unconvinced that any land or any people could compare with old Virginia. The average American in Lon don is a spectacle which has in it nothing inharmonious; on the contrary, in these days it is sometimes in his life, to a feeling somewhat akin to insignificance creeping over him. He would hate and despise himself for it, but still it would make him uncomfortable, and he would want to get away home. A depressing suspicion would come over our good friend that the haughty squires and dames knew no more of Virginia's history, or of Pages and Randolphs, and Pendletons and Byrds, than they knew of the obscure Elijahs and Hirams and Aarons that tilled the stony fields of New England. I fear, moreover, that the suspicion would be too well founded. As a Cumberland squire in the eighteenth century might have been disillusioned by a visit to the capital, so to a much greater degree our good Virginia friend have in all probability suffered by similar transportation. Once home again, however, I can safely affirm of the Doctor, that these uncomfortable sensations would have vanished in no time. Once more in his cane-bottomed rocking-chair on the shady porch; once more within sight of the blue mountains, the red fallows, and the yellow pine-sprinkled sedge-fields of his native land, he would quickly recover from the temporary shocks that had irritated him. The sublime faith in the grand old Commonwealth" would return, and he would thank God more fervently that ever he was a son of Virginia: not because of her present or her future-for he considered the Virginia he belonged to died with slavery-but on account of her people and her past. The Doctor, happily, had been spared all these trials, and his faith remained pure and unimpaired. The only capital he had ever visited was the charming little city of Richmond, where every third man or woman he met was his cousin; where most of society call one another by their Christian names, dine in the middle of the day, and sit out on chairs in the street after supper. Richmond is delightful, and so are its people; but its atmosphere would tend to confirm, not to shake, the Doctor's homely faith. Perhaps the Southern States was the only part of the world where the practice of medicine has ever been looked upon as an honourable adjunct to the possession of considerable landed estates and an aristocratic name. As in England there are squire-parsons, so in Virginia there were squiredoctors-men of considerable property (as things go there) both in land and slaves-regularly practising in their own neighbourhood. The slaves that constituted the bulk of their wealth have gone, but the lands and the practice remain-for those who still survive and are able to sit upon a horse. The Doctor is one of these survivals-and may he long flourish! He had only a moderate property two farms---of which we shall speak anon. But then he was a Patton; and as everybody south of the Potomac knows, the Pattons are one of the first families in the State,-none of your modern and self-dubbed F.F.V.'s are they, but real old colonial people, whose names are written on almost every page of their country's history. Besides, this Judge Patton, the Doctor's father, was one of the greatest jurists south of Washington "in the world," Virginians said; but as a compromise we will admit he was one of the first in America, and quite distinguished enough to reflect a social halo over his immediate descendants, supposing even they had not been Pattons. The original Patton mansion was burnt down in 1840. Nothing was left but the office in the yard, where in those days our friend the Doctor pursued his youthful medical investigations and entertained his bachelor friends. The Judge was a busy man, and much absent. He was always "laying out to build him a new house; but death "laid him out" while the scheme was still in embryo. The Doctor, who, as only son, became proprietor, had his hands too full, what with negroes, and farming, and physicking, and fox-hunting, to carry it out till the war was upon him, and with its results put an end, as he thought at the time, to everything which makes life sweet. anything!" the ladies that sometimes accompanied them never failed to remark. "That's a real old ramshackle Virginia house, by thunder! and a pretty heavy old fossil inside it, you bet!" said the more observant of the gentlemen. The Doctor would have gloried in such criticism had he heard it. He hated Yankees; he hated your new-fangled houses; he hated railroads; he hated towns; he hated breech-loading guns: sights and sounds and things that he was not familiar with at five-andtwenty, he would have none of when he was between sixty and seventy. The Doctor's house was unconventional to be sure, while weather and neglect of paint or whitewash had given it an air of antiquity to which it had no real claim. It lay a hundred yards back from the road, and appeared to consist of four or five small houses of varying dimensions, and occupying relationships towards one another of a most uncertain kind. Two of these leaned heavily together, like convivial old gentlemen "seeing one another home." The rest lay at respectful distances from each other, connected only by open verandahs, through which the summer breeze blew freshly, and lovingly fanned the annuals that spread and twined themselves along the eaves. Almost every style of Virginia rural architecture found place in this homely conglomeration of edifices which even "old man Jake," the negro, who has for twenty years looked after the Doctor's horses and stolen his corn, described as "mighty shacklin', and lookin' like as if they'd bin throwed down all in a muss.' It must not, however, be supposed that the Doctor and his father had gone houseless or camped out since 1840. Not at all. From the old brick office, whose isolation had saved it from that memorable conflagration, there had grown-I use the word advisedly, as applicable to Virginia architecture there had grown a rambling structure, whose design, rather than whose actual weight of years, gave it an appearance venerable enough to command the respect and admiration of summer tourists from New York and Philadelphia. It was not often such apparitions passed that way, and when they did, it was generally in pursuit of filthy lucre suppositiously concealed in the fields or the forests. Nor are mining prospectors as a rule sentimental, but sometimes they are in America. When such rara aves came by the Doctor's front gate, they would almost always pull up and gaze through it with that admiration and respect that Northerners are inclined to pay to anything in It was, however, a real old chartheir own country that recalls the acteristic Virginia house of its past. kind. There were squared chest"Oh, isn't that too quaint for nut-logs, black with rain and sun, appealed to the sense of the pic- The against which the venetian shutters of the windows banged and thumped in gusty spring days as against walls of adamant. These same logs were got out of the woods and squared, the Doctor would tell you, in days when men had plenty of time and plenty of force (ie., slaves) to do those things properly.' Then there were walls of pine weather - boarding, erected at a period when, the same authority would inform you, "people began to saw and season their lumber five or ten years before they started to build." There were roofs of wooden shingles slanting and sloping in every direction black, rotting, and moss - grown here, white and garish there, where penetrating rains had forced the slow and reluctant hand of repair. Dormer-windows glared out at you, patched as to their shattered panes with local newspapers of remote date, and speaking of stuffy attics behind, where hornets, yellow-jackets, and "muddaubers" careered about in summertime over the apple-strewn floors. Then there was the old brick office -relic of a distant past: of a period when the Virginia planters, though surrounded by the finest clay, were so absorbed in tobacco that they sent to England for their bricks. It is probable, however, that these particular bricks were produced upon the spot. At any rate, their comparative antiquity and presumably mellow tone have been ruthlessly effaced, for this is the only part of the Doctor's mansion that he has selected for a coat of whitewash. It is used for professional purposes, and is known by the Doctor's patients as the "sujjery." I know it is Yes! these objects are, and all hopeless to try, by a bald descrip- and many more are, twined around tion of timber and bricks and my heart, but the Doctor's front mortar, to give any idea of how gate occupies no such position at the Doctor's rambling homestead all. It was all very well for the |