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Peewawkin had always the reputation of a healthy town: and if it had been otherwise, Dr. Singletary was the last man in the world to transmute the aches and ails of its inhabitants into gold for his own pocket. So, at the age of sixty, he was little better off, in point of worldly substance, than when he came into possession of the small homestead of his father. He cultivated with his own hands his corn- field and potato-patch, and trimmed his apple and pear trees, as well satisfied with his patrimony as Horace was with his rustic Sabine villa. In addition to the care of his homestead and his professional duties, he had long been one of the overseers of the poor and a member of the school committee in his town; and he was a sort of standing reference in all disputes about wages, boundaries, and cattle trespasses in his neighborhood. He had, nevertheless, a good deal of leisure for reading, errands of charity, and social visits. He loved to talk with his friends, Elder Staples, the minister, Deacon Warner, and Skipper Evans. He was an expert angler, and knew all the haunts of pickerel and trout for many miles around. His favorite place of resort was the hill back of his house, which afforded a view of the long valley of the Tocketuck and the great sea. Here he would sit, enjoying the calm beauty of the landscape, pointing out to me localities interesting from their historical or traditional associations, or connected in some way with humorous or pathetic passages of his own life experience. Some of these autobiographical fragments affected me deeply. In narrating them he invested familiar and commonplace facts with something of the fascination of romance. “Human life,” he would say, “is the same everywhere. If we could but get at the truth, we should find that all the tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare have been reproduced in this little village. God has made all of one blood; what is true of one man is in some sort true of another; manifestations may differ, but the essential elements and spring of action are the same. On the surface, everything about us just now looks prosaic and mechanical; you see only a sort of bark-mill grinding over of the same dull, monotonous grist of daily trifles. But underneath all this there is an earnest life, rich and beautiful with love and hope, or dark with hatred, and sorrow, and remorse. That fisherman by the riverside, or that woman at the stream below, with her wash-tub,–who knows what lights and shadows checker their memories, or what present thoughts of theirs, born of heaven or hell, the future shall ripen into deeds of good or evil? Ah, what have I not seen and heard? My profession has been to me, in some sort, like the vial genie of the Salamanca student; it has unroofed these houses, and opened deep, dark chambers to the hearts of their tenants, which no eye save that of God had ever looked upon. Where I least expected them, I have encountered shapes of evil; while, on the other hand, I have found beautiful, heroic love and self-denial in those who had seemed to me frivolous and selfish.”

So would Dr. Singletary discourse as we strolled over Blueberry Hill, or drove along the narrow willow-shaded road which follows the windings of the river. He had read and thought much in his retired, solitary life, and was evidently well satisfied to find in me a gratified listener. He talked well and fluently, with little regard to logical sequence, and with something of the dogmatism natural to one whose opinions had seldom been subjected to scrutiny. He seemed equally at home in the most abstruse questions of theology and metaphysics, and in the more practical matters of mackerel-fishing, corn-growing, and cattle-raising. It was manifest that to his book lore he had added that patient and close observation of the processes of Nature which often places the unlettered ploughman and mechanic on a higher level of available intelligence than that occupied by professors and school men. To him nothing which had its root in the eternal verities of Nature was “common or unclean.” The blacksmith, subjecting to his will the swart genii of the mines of coal and iron; the potter, with his “power over the clay;” the skipper, who had tossed in his frail fishing-smack among the icebergs of Labrador; the farmer, who had won from Nature the occult secrets of her woods and fields; and even the vagabond hunter and angler, familiar with the habits of animals and the migration of birds and fishes,–had been his instructors; and he was not ashamed to acknowledge that they had taught him more than college or library.