It is time you knew old Doctor Felix Longstreet, Nance Gwyn's Waltonian grandfather. For short, she frequently designated him as "The G. F." His chief happiness lay in the hours he stole from his practise to put in with a rod and minnows on Eagle Creek and in rearing his granddaughter, both of whose parents were dead, in the most unconventional manner possible. With him lived a maiden sister, Miss Barbara. Her gods were convention and propriety. They were the doctor's devils. Truly, Nance lived "between the devil and the deep blue sea!"

"The world of men," I once heard the old doctor remark, "is divided into two classes: those who understand that a river has a heart and those who do not care a tinker's damn if it hasn't." Upon his retiring from the room a half-hour after this sentence was delivered, Aunt Barbara, after glancing timidly about to be sure that he had gone, ventured to Nance and me, engaged in making a small boat upon the portico, the following:

"He is right. Always right, for that matter!" she exclaimed with vehemence, nervously patting her foot upon the floor. "Now I know of no one who has so many characteristics in common with a stream as my brother Felix. He can be as full of peace and happiness and gentle little ripples to-day, then to-morrow as picturesque with whippy, foamy whitecaps and occasional squalls as the river he loves."

"Very true, Aunt Barbara," commented Nance with deliberateness, "and I know he can flow by in the most exasperatingly placid, disinterested manner possible. Also, should the occasion arise, quickly fill up with ice!"

It would be unfair, however, not to tell you that a more gentle man or true never lived than this old river god. Indeed, he is the veritable reincarnation of Izaak Walton. It is true old Izaak tended his linen-draper's shop, while Doctor Longstreet tends his pills. It was Jean FranÇois who made the remark that the chief difference lay in the fact that the one coated the body on the outside while the other coats it on the inside. Our pedler also pointed out, again, that both were very much alike in loving a friend, a pipe with a bit of philosophy, a quiet stream, and a favorite rod with which to go a-fishing.

Just how long Doctor Longstreet has practised medicine in Oldmeadow, I shall not presume to say. It seems to me as if always he has been there; always smelling delightfully of a mixture of strong tobacco smoke and carbolic acid; always riding over the countryside, or carrying through the town a pair of small leather saddle-bags or a fishing pole. Very frequently both. Nance, who was in a position to know, said that one side of these cases contained pills and the other angle worms.

At any rate, I know that seemingly a very long time ago, in comparison with myself, he was born in Virginia. In his youth he was graduated from the University at Charlottesville, and later from the Jefferson Medical College. Upon receiving his diploma, entitling him to practise medicine, he came directly to Oldmeadow. Except for four years spent as a surgeon in the Confederate army, he has given his life to this old Kentucky town on the Ohio river. For the present this is enough of him, save to mention that other than Nance, with the sun-colored hair; the river, which embraces "goin' a-fishin'"; and General Robert E. Lee, a name symbolizing all that Virginia and the South mean to him, he loves the little town, with its old-fashioned customs and traditions, which has been the background for most of his activities.

The morning following our glorious introduction to the magnificent Jean FranÇois I was out early and bound for the commons. I scarcely expected Nance to be up. I felt that there would be something intimate and personal, perhaps undefinable, it is true, between this master of the happy caravan and myself because we were both men. I had made up my mind that he was a woman-hater. As I hurried along the street my plans were brutally shattered, for whom should I encounter but the red-headed jade herself, grinning quite wickedly, even though her hand was tightly gripped in that of her Aunt Barbara, whose serious features were drawn together in grim determination.

"I want you, too, Charles Reubelt," said Miss Longstreet curtly, and with evident disapproval not only in her tone, but in the look with which she surveyed my full diminutive person.

"Yes, we want you, Charles Reubelt," Nance reiterated in close, but undetected, imitation of her Aunt Barbara.

Now while this really very charming spinster had no actual command over me, having quite tangible parents two blocks away, yet I acknowledged an assumed authority felt by every boy and girl in Oldmeadow. So, yielding, I fell in behind, marching meekly to Doctor Longstreet's office.

We entered in single file, Miss Longstreet shoving Nance unceremoniously before her. I lingered, cap in hand, near the open door.

"Felix," she began, in a voice slightly agitated by the fear of the unknown result in approaching the old doctor upon any subject, "do you know where these children were last night?"

"No, my dear Barbara," he replied with irony, looking up from a series of powders he was proportioning with his jack-knife on a piece of newspaper; "were they drowned?"

"No, but she might well have been, for all that you look after her!" she exclaimed, now leaving me out of the arraignment and giving herself solely to Nance.

After carefully lifting each powder onto a small square piece of paper, torn from his writing pad, folding them neatly, and placing all of them in an envelope which he proceeded to seal, then to write directions upon the back, he again gave his attention to his sister.

"So she has been swimming with Charles Reubelt," he said, in mock horror.

"For heaven's sake, no, Felix. Don't you dare suggest such a thing to her.... The way you do talk!"

"What has she been doing then?" he asked, looking severely over the rims of his spectacles at the offending young lady.

With slow and effective emphasis Aunt Barbara brought her accusation:

"They were out on the common until ten o'clock last night with a tramp, that's what!" You will notice that again I was included in her remarks.

"With what?... With who?" he exclaimed to Nance.

"With Jean FranÇois," came the brave reply of the jade.

"Barbara, Barbara," he exclaimed in quick, whispered hisses.

"Yes, my brother," she replied, rising to the seriousness of the occasion.

"They say that his ears are pointed! That he has legs and feet like a goat!"

"How shockingly unbecoming," and she gazed reproachfully at the culprits.

The doctor glared viciously at each of us in turn; blew his nose resonantly; shook himself like a big Newfoundland, and then, much to Miss Longstreet's chagrin and our astonishment, burst into hearty laughter.

"What!" cried he. "So you two are just discovering my friend, Jean FranÇois?... Poet, pedler, philosopher, mender of umbrellas, and player on the pipes," said he, drolly imitating our friend of the night before.

"You knew him all of the time?" I exclaimed.

"Let me see," said the doctor reminiscently; "when did I first discover the happy pedler?... O, yes, the second year after the AbbÉ Picot came to live in Oldmeadow. I remember now. It has been some five or six years ago.... That's what you youngsters get by going away every summer instead of remaining at home with your betters."

"Is he a real poet?" ventured Nance, with her accustomed irrelevance.

"Certainly," came the reply. "Hasn't he said so? Besides, he knows his Shakespeare like a scholar.... Cultivate him."

"Cultivate!" cried the now fully alarmed Aunt Barbara. "Felix, you are positively indecorous.... Cultivate a tramp?"

"Barbara, my dear, I assure you, he is quite a gentleman. He likes my pills, he loves the river like a brother, and he knows his Shakespeare. That is quite enough.... What do you want, my dear unwearied sister—a frilled shirt-front? I've seen many a one bowing over you in the old days all togged out in finery who hadn't half so great a heart and half so genuine a manner.

"Now, Nance," he said, turning from the thoroughly squelched Aunt Barbara to us, "Jean FranÇois comes with his happy caravan—a name I gave his outfit the first time I saw it—every year when May or June is at her bonniest. Nobody knows just when or where he comes from, and no one, who loves him, cares. All of a sudden he's here, that's all. He always camps on the green, where you discovered him last night, overlooking the river. Sometimes he's here most of the summer. Sometimes it's just a week, or a month. Then, like he comes, he just goes.

"'It's a fever,' he said to me once in answer to a question as to why he was off, when I met him on the river road, bound west. 'It's a fever that you, old Saddle-bags, can't pill or cuss away.... Au revoir,' and his Columbine moved away.

"Occasionally he returns during the late September days. It is only for a week or a day, however.... I can always tell that he is coming by the wild geese flying. He is a migratory bird—this Jean FranÇois of ours."

If the doctor continued to speak of the pedler to Aunt Barbara, we never knew it. Nance and I slipped through the door into the June sunshine and hurried across the village to the common, where camped the master of the happy caravan.