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Let Me Feel Your Pulse
by
“What doctor?”
“Doctor Tatum — the old doctor who lives halfway up Black Oak Mountain. Do you know him?”
“I have known him since I was able to talk. And is that where you go every day — is it he who takes you on these long walks and climbs that have brought back your health and strength? God bless the old doctor.”
Just then the old doctor himself drove slowly down the road in his rickety old buggy. I waved my hand at him and shouted that I would be on hand the next day at the usual time. He stopped his horse and called to Amaryllis to come out to him. They talked for five minutes while I waited. Then the old doctor drove on.
When we got to the house Amaryllis lugged out an encyclopaedia and sought a word in it. “The doctor said,” she told me, “that you needn’t call any more as a patient, but he’d be glad to see you any time as a friend. And then he told me to look up my name in the encyclopaedia and tell you what it means. It seems to be the name of a genus of flowering plants, and also the name of a country girl in Theocritus and Virgil. What do you suppose the doctor meant by that?”
“I know what he meant,” said I. “I know now.”
A word to a brother who may have come under the spell of the unquiet Lady Neurasthenia.
The formula was true. Even though gropingly at times, the physicians of the walled cities had put their fingers upon the specific medicament.
And so for the exercise one is referred to good Doctor Tatum on Black Oak Mountain — take the road to your right at the Methodist meeting house in the pine-grove.
Absolute rest and exercise!
What rest more remedial than to sit with Amaryllis in the shade, and, with a sixth sense, read the wordless Theocritan idyl of the gold-bannered blue mountains marching orderly into the dormitories of the night?