University of Virginia Library

15. CHAPTER XV.

ELI BOLTON and his wife talked over Ruth's case, as
they had often done before, with no little anxiety.
Alone of all their children she was impatient of the restraints
and monotony of the Friends' Society, and wholly indisposed
to accept the “inner light” as a guide into a life of acceptance
and inaction. When Margaret told her husband of
Ruth's newest project, he did not exhibit so much surprise as
she looked for. In fact he said that he did not see why a
woman should not enter the medical profession if she felt a
call to it.

“But,” said Margaret, “consider her total inexperience of
the world, and her frail health. Can such a slight little body
endure the ordeal of the preparation for, or the strain of, the
practice of the profession?”

“Did thee ever think, Margaret, whether she can endure
being thwarted in an object on which she has so set her heart,
as she has on this? Thee has trained her thyself at home, in
her enfeebled childhood, and thee knows how strong her will
is, and what she has been able to accomplish in self-culture by
the simple force of her determination. She never will be
satisfied until she has tried her own strength.”

“I wish,” said Margaret, with an inconsequence that is not
exclusively feminine, “that she were in the way to fall in
love and marry by and by. I think that would cure her of

some of her notions. I am not sure but if she went away to
some distant school, into an entirely new life, her thoughts
would be diverted.”

Eli Bolton almost laughed as he regarded his wife, with
eyes that never looked at her except fondly, and replied,

“Perhaps thee remembers that thee had notions also, before
we were married, and before thee became a member of
Meeting. I think Ruth comes honestly by certain tendencies
which thee has hidden under the Friend's dress.”

Margaret could not say no to this, and while she paused, it
was evident that memory was busy with suggestions to shake
her present opinions.

“Why not let Ruth try the study for a time,” suggested
Eli; “there is a fair beginning of a Woman's Medical College
in the city. Quite likely she will soon find that she needs
first a more general culture, and fall in with thy wish that
she should see more of the world at some large school.”

There really seemed to be nothing else to be done, and
Margaret consented at length without approving. And it was
agreed that Ruth, in order to spare her fatigue, should take
lodgings with friends near the college and make a trial in the
pursuit of that science to which we all owe our lives, and
sometimes as by a miracle of escape.

That day Mr. Bolton brought home a stranger to dinner,
Mr. Bigler of the great firm of Pennybacker, Bigler & Small,
railroad contractors. He was always bringing home somebody,
who had a scheme; to build a road, or open a mine, or
plant a swamp with cane to grow paper-stock, or found a
hospital, or invest in a patent shad-bone separator, or start a
college somewhere on the frontier, contiguous to a land
speculation.

The Bolton house was a sort of hotel for this kind of people.
They were always coming. Ruth had known them from
childhood, and she used to say that her father attracted them
as naturally as a sugar hogshead does flies. Ruth had an idea
that a large portion of the world lived by getting the rest of
the world into schemes. Mr. Bolton never could say “no”
to any of them, not even, said Ruth again, to the society for

to any of them, not even, said Ruth again, to the society for
stamping oyster shells with scripture texts before they were
sold at retail.

Mr. Bigler's plan this time, about which he talked
loudly, with his mouth full, all dinner time, was the building
of the Tunkhannock, Rattlesnake and Youngwomanstown
railroad, which would not only be a great highway to
the west, but would open to market inexhaustible coal-fields
and untold millions of lumber. The plan of operations
was very simple.

“We'll buy the lands,” explained he, “on long time, backed
by the notes of good men; and then mortgage them for
money enough to get the road well on. Then get the towns
on the line to issue their bonds for stock, and sell their bonds
for enough to complete the road, and partly stock it, especially
if we mortgage each section as we complete it. We can then
sell the rest of the stock on the prospect of the business of
the road through an improved country, and also sell the lands
at a big advance, on the strength of the road. All we want,”
continued Mr. Bigler in his frank manner, “is a few thousand
dollars to start the surveys, and arrange things in the legislature.
There is some parties will have to be seen, who might
make us trouble.”

“It will take a good deal of money to start the enterprise,”
remarked Mr. Bolton, who knew very well what “seeing” a
Pennsylvania Legislature meant, but was too polite to tell Mr.
Bigler what he thought of him, while he was his guest; “what
security would one have for it?”

Mr. Bigler smiled a hard kind of smile, and said, “You'd
be inside, Mr. Bolton, and you'd have the first chance in
the deal.”

This was rather unintelligible to Ruth, who was nevertheless
somewhat amused by the study of a type of character she had
seen before. At length she interrupted the conversation by
asking,

“You'd sell the stock, I suppose, Mr. Bigler, to anybody
who was attracted by the prospectus?”

[ILLUSTRATION]

CARING FOR THE POOR.

[Description: 499EAF. Page 142. In-line image of an old pompous man and his slave in a a doorway.]

“O, certainly, serve all alike,” said Mr. Bigler, now noticing
Ruth for the first time, and a little puzzled by the serene,
intelligent face that was turned towards him.

“Well, what would become of the poor people who had
been led to put their little money into the speculation, when
you got out of it and left it half way?”

It would be no more true to say of Mr. Bigler that he was
or could be embarrassed, than to say that a brass counterfeit
dollar-piece would change color when refused; the question
annoyed him a little, in Mr. Bolton's presence.

“Why, yes, Miss, of course, in a great enterprise for the
benefit of the community there will little things occur, which,
which—and, of course, the poor ought to be looked to; I tell
my wife, that the poor must be looked to; if you can tell
who are poor—there's so many impostors. And then, there's

so many poor in the legislature to be looked after,” said the
contractor with a sort of a chuckle, “isn't that so, Mr.
Bolton?”

Eli Bolton replied that he never had much to do with the
legislature.

“Yes,” continued this public benefactor, “an uncommon
poor lot this year, uncommon. Consequently an expensive
lot. The fact is, Mr. Bolton, that the price is raised so high
on United States Senator now, that it affects the whole market;
you can't get any public improvement through on
reasonable terms. Simony is what I call it, Simony,” repeated
Mr. Bigler, as if he had said a good thing.

Mr. Bigler went on and gave some very interesting details
of the intimate connection between railroads and politics, and
thoroughly entertained himself all dinner time, and as much
disgusted Ruth, who asked no more questions, and her father
who replied in monosyllables.

“I wish,” said Ruth to her father, after the guest had
gone, “that you wouldn't bring home any more such horrid
men. Do all men who wear big diamond breast-pins, flourish
their knives at table, and use bad grammar, and cheat?”

“O, child, thee mustn't be too observing. Mr. Bigler is
one of the most important men in the state; nobody has
more influence at Harrisburg. I don't like him any more
than thee does, but I'd better lend him a little money than
to have his ill will.”

“Father, I think thee'd better have his ill-will than his
company. Is it true that he gave money to help build the
pretty little church of St. James the Less, and that he is one
of the vestrymen?”

“Yes. He is not such a bad fellow. One of the men in
Third street asked him the other day, whether his was a high
church or a low church? Bigler said he didn't know; he'd
been in it once, and he could touch the ceiling in the side
aisle with his hand.”

“I think he's just horrid,” was Ruth's final summary of
him, after the manner of the swift judgment of women, with

no consideration of the extenuating circumstances. Mr.
Bigler had no idea that he had not made a good impression
on the whole family; he certainly intended to be agreeable.
Margaret agreed with her daughter, and though she never
said anything to such people, she was grateful to Ruth for
sticking at least one pin into him.

Such was the serenity of the Bolton household that a stranger
in it would never have suspected there was any opposition
to Ruth's going to the Medical School. And she went
quietly to take her residence in town, and began her attendance
of the lectures, as if it were the most natural thing in
the world. She did not heed, if she heard, the busy and
wondering gossip of relations and acquaintances, gossip that
has no less currency among the Friends than elsewhere
because it is whispered slyly and creeps about in an undertone.

Ruth was absorbed, and for the first time in her life
thoroughly happy; happy in the freedom of her life, and in
the keen enjoyment of the investigation that broadened its
field day by day. She was in high spirits when she came
home to spend First Days; the house was full of her gaiety
and her merry laugh, and the children wished that Ruth
would never go away again. But her mother noticed, with
a little anxiety, the sometimes flushed face, and the sign of
an eager spirit in the kindling eyes, and, as well, the serious
air of determination and endurance in her face at unguarded
moments.

The college was a small one and it sustained itself not
without difficulty in this city, which is so conservative, and is
yet the origin of so many radical movements. There were
not more than a dozen attendants on the lectures all together,
so that the enterprise had the air of an experiment, and the
fascination of pioneering for those engaged in it. There was
one woman physician driving about town in her carriage,
attacking the most violent diseases in all quarters with persistent
courage, like a modern Bellona in her war chariot,
who was popularly supposed to gather in fees to the amount

[ILLUSTRATION]

ANATOMICAL INVESTIGATIONS.

[Description: 499EAF. Page 145. In-line image of two women sitting at a desk working on dissections in a medical room with skeletons in the backroom.] of ten to twenty thousand dollars a year. Perhaps some of
these students looked forward to the near day when they
would support such a practice and a husband besides, but it is
unknown that any of them ever went further than practice in
hospitals and in their own nurseries, and it is feared that some
of them were quite as ready as their sisters, in emergencies,
to “call a man.”

If Ruth had any exaggerated expectations of a professional
life, she kept them to herself, and was known to her fellows
of the class simply as a cheerful, sincere student, eager in her
investigations, and never impatient at anything, except an
insinuation that women had not as much mental capacity for
science as men.

They really say,” said one young Quaker sprig to another
youth of his age, “that Ruth Bolton is really going to be a
saw-bones, attends lectures, cuts up bodies, and all that. She's
cool enough for a surgeon, anyway.” He spoke feelingly,
for he had very likely been weighed in Ruth's calm eyes

sometime, and thoroughly scared by the little laugh that
accompanied a puzzling reply to one of his conversational
nothings. Such young gentlemen, at this time, did not come
very distinctly into Ruth's horizon, except as amusing circumstances.

About the details of her student life, Ruth said very little
to her friends, but they had reason to know, afterwards, that
it required all her nerve and the almost complete exhaustion
of her physical strength, to carry her through. She began
her anatomical practice upon detached portions of the human
frame, which were brought into the demonstrating room—
dissecting the eye, the ear, and a small tangle of muscles
and nerves—an occupation which had not much more savor
of death in it than the analysis of a portion of a plant out of
which the life went when it was plucked up by the roots.
Custom inures the most sensitive persons to that which is at
first most repellant; and in the late war we saw the most
delicate women, who could not at home endure the sight of
blood, become so used to scenes of carnage, that they walked
the hospitals and the margins of battle-fields, amid the poor
remnants of torn humanity, with as perfect self-possession
as if they were strolling in a flower garden.

It happened that Ruth was one evening deep in a line of
investigation which she could not finish or understand without
demonstration, and so eager was she in it, that it seemed
as if she could not wait till the next day. She, therefore,
persuaded a fellow student, who was reading that evening
with her, to go down to the dissecting room of the college,
and ascertain what they wanted to know by an hour's work
there. Perhaps, also, Ruth wanted to test her own nerve,
and to see whether the power of association was stronger in
her mind than her own will.

The janitor of the shabby and comfortless old building
admitted the girls, not without suspicion, and gave them
lighted candles, which they would need, without other remark
than “there's a new one, Miss,” as the girls went up the
broad stairs.

They climbed to the third story, and paused before a door,

which they unlocked, and which admitted them into a long
apartment, with a row of windows on one side and one at the
end. The room was without light, save from the stars and
the candles the girls carried, which revealed to them dimly
two long and several small tables, a few benches and chairs,
a couple of skeletons hanging on the wall, a sink, and cloth-covered
heaps of something upon the tables here and there.

The windows were open, and the cool night wind came in
strong enough to flutter a white covering now and then, and
to shake the loose casements. But all the sweet odors of the
night could not take from the room a faint suggestion of
mortality.

The young ladies paused a moment. The room itself was
familiar enough, but night makes almost any chamber eerie,
and especially such a room of detention as this where the
mortal parts of the unburied might almost be supposed to be
visited, on the sighing night winds, by the wandering spirits
of their late tenants.

Opposite and at some distance across the roofs of lower
buildings, the girls saw a tall edifice, the long upper story
of which seemed to be a dancing hall. The windows of that
were also open, and through them they heard the scream of
the jiggered and tortured violin, and the pump, pump of the
oboe, and saw the moving shapes of men and women in quick
transition, and heard the prompter's drawl.

“I wonder,” said Ruth, “what the girls dancing there
would think if they saw us, or knew that there was such a
room as this so near them.”

She did not speak very loud, and, perhaps unconsciously,
the girls drew near to each other as they approached the long
table in the centre of the room. A straight object lay upon
it, covered with a sheet. This was doubtless “the new one”
of which the janitor spoke. Ruth advanced, and with a not
very steady hand lifted the white covering from the upper
part of the figure and turned it down. Both the girls started.
It was a negro. The black face seemed to defy the pallor of
death, and asserted an ugly life-likeness that was frightful.

Ruth was as pale as the white sheet, and her comrade whispered,
“Come away, Ruth, it is awful.”

Perhaps it was the wavering light of the candles, perhaps
it was only the agony from a death of pain, but the repulsive
black face seemed to wear a scowl that said, “Haven't you
yet done with the outcast, persecuted black man, but you must
now haul him from his grave, and send even your women to
dismember his body?”

Who is this dead man, one of thousands who died yesterday,
and will be dust anon, to protest that science shall not
turn his worthless carcass to some account?

Ruth could have had no such thought, for with a pity in
her sweet face, that for the moment overcame fear and disgust,
she reverently replaced the covering, and went away to
her own table, as her companion did to hers. And there for
an hour they worked at their several problems, without
speaking, but not without an awe of the presence there, “the
new one,” and not without an awful sense of life itself, as
they heard the pulsations of the music and the light laughter
from the dancing-hall.

When, at length, they went away, and locked the dreadful
room behind them, and came out into the street, where people
were passing, they, for the first time, realized, in the relief
they felt, what a nervous strain they had been under.