Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 6.djvu/116

 9 8

��THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

��labored for ten years, when he was in- duced to accept a pastorate in Maine. His last days were passed in Farming- ton, N. H., and, like many persons of great age, his mind somewhat failed a short time before his death ; but notwithstanding his feebleness, it was a common remark in the town that " old Priest Parker never forgot to be a gentleman." His son David follow- ed the fortunes of his father, with occasional seasons of farming for neighbors, as the custom was in those days of "New England Bygones," until he was about seventeen years old, when he went to attend the academy at Alfred, Me.

He studied in summer and taught in winter until his twentieth year, when he began the study of medicine with L. M. Barker, m. d., at Somersworth. He attended lectures at Dartmouth College in 1833, and continued his studies with Dr. Charles F. Elliott and Dr. B. Smart, of Kennebunk, Me., graduating at Bowdoin College, May 17, 1836.

Dr. Parker began the practice of his profession in Farmington, N. H., March 3, 1837. This town was then a small obscure village of fifteen houses and about one hundred and twenty-five inhabitants ; it has increased twenty fold, and is now an opulent, enterpris- ing town, whose chief industry is the manufacture of shoes. It lies midway between Dover and Alton Bay, and while being probably no more picturesque than are many New Hampshire villages, it is characterized by one or two features which may be worthy of men- tion. The majority of the operatives in the great shoe factories are house- owners, their dwellings being neat cottages as a rule, while a few are more pretentious, and their stables contain teams for pleasure-driving in many instances ; and there is hardly a house, either owned or hired by its inhabitants, which does not hold a cabinet organ or a piano. Especially noteworthy is the fact that, of its three thousand and more inhabitants, there are ro moie than a half-dozen heads

��of families who are not Ameri- cans, — the foreign element being Swedes, French, and Irish, while of blacks there may be three individuals. It is, to an unusual extent, purely democratic in social estimates, its people being largely connected by intermarriage, inherited friendship, and the like. While not a very literary or intellectual community, in the usual acceptation of those terms, it is one of the brightest to appreciate a lecture filled with keen wit and practical com- mon sense, or a thoroughbred enter- tainment — if one may so speak of any thing of the kind ; to be sure it rather enjoys being amused to being barely edified ; but it delights in a judicious combination of the two attributes.

Here and there, as will be the case with all localities, there are extraordi- nary settlements composed of persons of doubtful origin and customs ; on the other hand are those of long de- scent and inherited individuality of another sort. An experienced novelist might find, in this town lying in the bottom of a cup, with hills for sides, material for many a new notion, for, since to a place so situated there comes every variety of climate which should range over a great extent of country, there belong also human caprices to correspond with its varying tempera- ture and skies.

To this town, then, came the young medical man, married and a father, as is proper for medical men, in the first flush of enthusiasm for his pro- fession, and gifted with that hardly to be analyzed faculty which goes to the making of good doctors and nurses, and which, like the soul of the poet, is born but not made. For forty-five years Dr. Parker's horses, mostly of the enduring Morgan breed, have been well-known for miles around, as they have sturdily trotted over the rough roads by night and day, through sum- mer heat and winter cold ; and there is scarcely a family within a large radius that has not welcomed the stout figure and keen blue eye of "the old Doctor" as He has come in time of need, bring-

�� �