The old doctor Author:John Vance Cheney Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. " Born into life!—we bring A bias with us here, And, when here, each new thing Affects us we come near; To tunes we did not call our being must ke... more »ep chime." Thomas and George Gale, natives of Massachusetts, lived in a village till old enough to enter on a course of academic study. Having been carefully tutored by their mother at home, on going away to school at the age of twelve they found themselves in advance of their fellow-pupils. Their father, Arthur B. Gale, was of aristocratic parentage—a Northerner by birth, educated among maternal relatives in the South. A college graduate, the inheritor of wealth, singularly attractive in person, when barely out of the teens he clandestinely married a gifted actress several years his senior. For the sake of a profession he studied law, and soon entered on a promising public career. His domestic relations proved unhappy, and, fortunately, perhaps, for both himself and family, they were terminated at the expiration of five short years by a duel of his own seeking. Later, the shadow of the hand of a gracious Providence may be discovered in the fact that he fell before the end of a celebrated trial in which he was engaged. The widow, left to care for her two boys, was in every way fitted for the responsibility. The equal, intellectually, of the man she married, she afterward developed a purity of spirit he could never have attained. Four years of her wedded life passed very heavily. After her husband's decease she seldom referred to him; neither did she regret that the child Tom had never called him father. There was an inborn estrangement between the parent now dead and this boy. George did not share his brother's unnatural sentiments; in this, as in many other particulars, their young natures were opposed. At sixte...« less