When, at the end of the first year, old Dr. Pastergood, who had ushered
Cornelia herself into this world, turned to them with her first child in
his arms, the young father stood by, controlling his great rush of primal
joy, his boyish desire to do something noisy and violent; the mother looked
first at her husband, then into the old doctor's face, with eyes of
passionate delight and appeal. He was speechless a moment, for pity. Then
he said, gently:
"Hit's gone, befo' hit ever come to us, Cornely. Hit never breathed a
breath of this werrisome world."
A man who had practised medicine in the Turkey Tracks for twenty-five years
--a doctor among these mountain people, where poverty is the rule, hardship
a condition of life, and tragedy a fairly familiar element, would have had
his fibre well stiffened. The brave old campaigner, who had sat beside so
many death-beds and so many birth-beds, and had seen so many come and so
many go, at the exits and entrances of life, met the matter stoutly and
without flinching. His stoic air, his words of passive acceptance, laid a
calm upon the first outburst of bitter grief from the two young creatures.
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