The Doctor by Ralph Connor — Read

The mill lane was prinked with all the June flowers. Over the snake fence massed the clover, red and white. Through the rails peeped the thistle bloom, pink and purple, and higher up above the top rail the white crest of the dogwood slowly nodded in the breeze this sweet summer day. In the clover the bumblebees, the crickets, and the grasshoppers boomed, chirped, crackled, shouting their joy to be alive in so good a place and on so good a day. Above, the sky was blue, pure blue, and all the bluer for the specks of cloud that hung, still-poised like white-winged birds, white against the blue. Last evening's rain had washed the world clean. The sky, the air, the flowers, the clover, red and white, the kindly grass that ran green everywhere under foot, the dusty road, all were washed clean. In the elm bunches by the fence, in the maples and thorns, the birds, their summer preoccupations forgotten at the bidding of this new washed day, recalled their spring songs and poured them forth with fine careless courage.

In tune to this brave symphony of colour and song, and down this flower-prinked, song-filled, clean washed, grassy lane stepped Dick this summer morning, stepped with the spring and balance of the well-trained athlete, stepped with the step of a man whose heart makes him merry music. A clean-looking man was Dick, harmonious with the day and with the lane down which he stepped. Against the grey of his suit his hands, his face, and his neck, where the negligee shirt fell away wide, revealing his strong, full curves spreading to the shoulders, all showed ruddy brown. He was a man good to look upon, with his springy step, his tan skin, his clear eye, but chiefly because out of his clear eye a soul looked forth clean and unafraid upon God's good world of wholesome growing things.