“Well, Dollie, the blackbirds are all gone. I am sorry. I like to see them, and I am always sorry to lose them, and sorry to know that winter is coming.”
“Usually about the 25th or 26th of December,” his daughter once quaintly added to me, “he would note that the days were beginning to get longer, and cheer up, as spring was certain to follow soon and bring them all back again.”
One of the most interesting of his bird friendships was that which existed between him and a pair of crows he and his sons had raised, “Jim” and “Zip” by name. These crows came to know him well, and were finally so humanly attached to him that, according to his family, they would often fly two or three miles out of town to meet him and would then accompany him, lighting on fences and trees by the way, and cawing to him as he drove along! Both of them were great thieves, and would steal anything from a bit of thread up to a sewing machine, if they could have carried it. They were always walking about the house, cheerfully looking for what they might devour, and on one occasion carried off a set of spoons, which they hid about the eaves of the house. On another occasion they stole a half dozen tin-handled pocket knives, which the doctor had bought for the children and which the crows seemed to like for the brightness of the metal. They were recovered once by the children, stolen again by the crows, recovered once more, and so on, until at last it was a question as to which were the rightful owners.
The doctor was sitting in front of a store one day in the business-heart of town, where also he liked to linger in fair weather, when suddenly he saw one of his crows flying high overhead and bearing something in its beak, which it dropped into the road scarcely a hundred feet away. Interested to see what it was the bird had been carrying, he went to the spot where he saw it fall and found one of the tin-handled knives, which the crow had been carrying to a safe hiding-place. He picked it up and when he returned home that night asked one of his boys if he could lend him a knife.
“No,” said his son. “Our knives are all lost. The crows took them.”
“I knew that,” said the doctor sweetly, “and so, when I met Zip uptown just now, I asked her to lend me one, and she did. Here it is.”
He pulled out the knife and handed it to the boy and, when the latter expressed doubt and wonder, insisted that the crow had loaned it to him; a joke which ended in his always asking one of the children to run and ask Zip if she would lend him a knife, whenever he chanced to need one.
Although a sad man at times, as I understood, the doctor was not a pessimist, and in many ways, both by practical jokes and the humoring of odd characters, sought relief from the intense emotional strain which the large practice of his profession put upon him. One of his greatest reliefs was the carrying out of these little practical jokes, and he had been known to go to much trouble at times to work up a good laugh.
One of the, to him, richest jokes, and one which he always enjoyed telling, related to a country singing school which was located in the neighborhood of Pierceton, in which reading (the alphabet, at least), spelling, geography, arithmetic, rules of grammar, and so forth, were still taught by a process of singing. The method adopted in this form of education was to have the scholar memorize all knowledge by singing it. Thus in the case of geography the students would sing the name of the country, then its mountains, then the highest peaks, cities, rivers, principal points of interest, and so on, until all information about that particular country had been duly memorized in song or rhyme. Occasionally they would have a school-day on which the local dignitaries would be invited, and on a number of these occasions the doctor was, for amusement’s sake merely, a grave and reverent listener. On one occasion, however, he was merely passing the school, when hearing “Africa-a, Africa-a, mountains of the moo-oo-oon” drawled out of the windows, he decided to stop in and listen a while. Having tethered his horse outside he knocked at the door and was received by the little English singing teacher who, after showing him to a seat, immediately called upon the class for an exhibition of their finest wisdom. When they had finished this the teacher turned to him and inquired if there was anything he would especially like them to sing.
“No,” said the doctor gravely, and no doubt with an amused twinkle in his eye, “I had thought of asking you to sing the Rocky Mountains, but as the mountains are so high, and the amount of time I have so limited, I have decided that perhaps it will be asking too much.”
“Oh, not at all, not at all” airily replied the teacher, and turning to his class, he exclaimed with a very superior smile: “Now, ladies and gentlemen, ‘ere is a scientific gentleman who thinks it is ‘arder to sing of ‘igh mountings than it is to sing of low mountings,” and forthwith the class began to demonstrate that in respect to vocalization there was no difference at all.
Only those, however, who knew Dr. Gridley in the sickroom, and knew him well, ever discovered the really finest trait of his character: a keen, unshielded sensibility to and sympathy for all human suffering, that could not bear to inflict the slightest additional pain. He was really, in the main, a man of soft tones and unctuous laughter, of gentle touch and gentle step, and a devotion to duty that carried him far beyond his interests or his personal well-being. One of his chiefest oppositions, according to his daughter, was to telling the friends or relatives of any stricken person that there was no hope. Instead, he would use every delicate shade of phrasing and tone in imparting the fateful words, in order if possible to give less pain. “I remember in the case of my father,” said one of his friends, “when the last day came. Knowing the end was near, he was compelled to make some preliminary discouraging remark, and I bent over with my ear against my father’s chest and said, ‘Doctor Gridley, the disease is under control, I think. I can hear the respiration to the bottom of the lungs.’
“‘Yes, yes,’ he answered me sadly, but now with an implication which could by no means be misunderstood, ‘it is nearly always so. The failure is in the recuperative energy. Vitality runs too low.’ It meant from the first, ‘Your father will not live.’”
In the case of a little child with meningitis, the same person was sent to him to ask what of the child—better or worse. His answer was: “He is passing as free from pain as ever I knew a case of this kind.”
In yet another case of a dying woman, one of her relatives inquired: “Doctor, is this case dangerous?” “Not in the nature of the malady, madam,” was his sad and sympathetic reply, “but fatal in the condition it meets. Hope is broken. There is nothing to resist the damage.”
One of his patients was a farmer who lived in an old-time log house a few miles out from Silver Lake, who while working about his barn met with a very serious accident which involved a possible injury to the gall bladder. The main accident was not in itself fatal, but the possible injury to the gall bladder was, and this, if it existed, would show as a yellow tint in the eyeball on the tenth day. Fearing the danger of this, he communicated the possibility to the relatives, saying that he could do little after that time but that he would come just the same and make the patient as comfortable as possible. For nine days he came, sitting by the bedside and whiling away many a weary hour for the sufferer, until the tenth morning. On this day, according to his daughter, who had it from the sick man’s relatives, his face but ill concealed the anxiety he felt. Coming up to the door, he entered just far enough to pretend to reach for a water bucket. With this in his hand he turned and gave one long keen look in the eye of the sick man, then walked down the yard to a chair under a tree some distance from the house, where he sat, drooping and apparently grieved, the certainty of the death of the patient affecting him as much as if he were his own child.