The Man Whose Yoke Was Not Easy
He was a spare man, and, physically, an ill-conditioned man, but at first glance scarcely a
seedy man. The indications of reduced circumstances in the male of the better class are, I
fancy, first visible in the boots and shirt; the boots offensively exhibiting a degree of
polish inconsistent with their dilapidated condition, and the shirt showing an extent of
ostentatious surface that is invariably fatal to the threadbare waist-coat that it partially
covers. He was a pale man, and, I fancied, still paler from his black clothes.
It was from a certain physician; a man of broad culture and broader experience; a man
who had devoted the greater part of his active life to the alleviation of sorrow and
suffering; a man who had lived up to the noble vows of a noble profession; a man who
locked in his honorable breast the secrets of a hundred families, whose face was as
kindly, whose touch was as gentle, in the wards of the great public hospitals as it was
beside the laced curtains of the dying Narcissa; a man who, through long contact with
suffering, had acquired a universal tenderness and breadth of kindly philosophy; a man
who, day and night, was at the beck and call of anguish; a man who never asked the
creed, belief, moral or worldly standing of the sufferer, or even his ability to pay the few
coins that enabled him (the physician) to exist and practice his calling; in brief, a man
who so nearly lived up to the example of the Great Master that it seems strange I am
writing of him as a doctor of medicine and not of divinity.
The note was in pencil, characteristically brief, and ran thus:--
"Here is the man I spoke of. He ought to be good material for you."
For a moment I sat looking from the note to the man, and sounding the "dim perilous
depths" of my memory for the meaning of this mysterious communication. The good
"material," however, soon relieved my embarrassment by putting his hand on his
waistcoat, coming toward me, and saying, "It is just here, you can feel it."
It was not necessary for me to do so. In a flash I remembered that my medical friend had
told me of a certain poor patient, once a soldier, who, among his other trials and
uncertainties, was afflicted with an aneurism caused by the buckle of his knapsack
pressing upon the arch of the aorta. It was liable to burst at any shock or any moment.
The poor fellow's yoke had indeed been too heavy.
In the presence of such a tremendous possibility I think for an instant I felt anxious only
about myself. What I should do; how dispose of the body; how explain the circumstance
of his taking off; how evade the ubiquitous reporter and the coroner's inquest; how a
suspicion might arise that I had in some way, through negligence or for some dark
purpose, unknown to the jury, precipitated the catastrophe, all flashed before me. Even
