Page 80 - Among the camps, or, Young people's stories of the war

T H E old doctor’s boots were very bad— those old boots

which Middle burgh knew as well as they knew Nancy
Pansy’s eyes or the church steeple. Mrs. Seddon had
taken the trouble to scold him one day in the autumn when
she heard him couching, and she had sent him a small roll of

money IJon account,” she wrote him, " o f a long; bill/ 1 to get
a pair of new boots. T h e old doctor never sent in a bill ; he
would as soon have sent a small-pox patient into Nancy
Pansy's playroom. He calmly returned the money, saying he
never transacted business with women who had husbands, and

that he had always dressed to suit himself, at which Mrs.
Seddon laughed ; for, like the rest of Middleburgh, she knew
that chose old boots never stood back for any weather, how­
ever bad. She arranged, however, to have a little money sent
to him through the post-office from another town without any

name to the letter enclosing it. But the old boots were still
worn, and Nancy Pansy, at her mother’s suggestion, learned
to knit, that she might have a pair of yarn socks knit for
the old doctor at Christmas. She intended to have kept this
a secret, and she did keep it from every one but the doctor;

she did not quite tell even him, but she could not help niak-