[pg/etext92/song10.txt]

This edition was prepared by at University of Nebraska at Omaha,
by Professors Judith Boss and Marvin Peterson; two versions were
preprared, one by typing the other by scanning and reconciled to
create the following edition.  Notes on the original edition and
on the corrections and changes made have been placed at the end.

                       THE SONG OF THE LARK
                          (1915 edition)
                                by
                           WILLA CATHER

                             CONTENTS

PART     I.  FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1
        II.  THE SONG OF THE LARK . . . . . . . . . . . . .  159
       III.  STUPID FACES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  247
        IV.  THE ANCIENT PEOPLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  293
         V.  DOCTOR ARCHIE'S VENTURE  . . . . . . . . . . .  343
        VI.  KRONBORG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  383
             EPILOGUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  481



                       THE SONG OF THE LARK

                              PART I

                       FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD

                                 I

     Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a
game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two travel-
ing men who happened to be staying overnight in Moon-
stone.  His offices were in the Duke Block, over the drug
store.  Larry, the doctor's man, had lit the overhead light
in the waiting-room and the double student's lamp on the
desk in the study.  The isinglass sides of the hard-coal
burner were aglow, and the air in the study was so hot that
as he came in the doctor opened the door into his little
operating-room, where there was no stove.  The waiting-
room was carpeted and stiffly furnished, something like a
country parlor.  The study had worn, unpainted floors, but
there was a look of winter comfort about it.  The doctor's
flat-top desk was large and well made; the papers were in
orderly piles, under glass weights.  Behind the stove a wide
bookcase, with double glass doors, reached from the floor
to the ceiling.  It was filled with medical books of every
thickness and color.  On the top shelf stood a long row of
thirty or forty volumes, bound all alike in dark mottled
board covers, with imitation leather backs.

     As the doctor in New England villages is proverbially
old, so the doctor in small Colorado towns twenty-five
years ago was generally young.  Dr. Archie was barely
thirty.  He was tall, with massive shoulders which he held
stiffly, and a large, well-shaped head.  He was a distin-
guished-looking man, for that part of the world, at least.



There was something individual in the way in which his
reddish-brown hair, parted cleanly at the side, bushed over
his high forehead.  His nose was straight and thick, and his
eyes were intelligent.  He wore a curly, reddish mustache
and an imperial, cut trimly, which made him look a little
like the pictures of Napoleon III.  His hands were large and
well kept, but ruggedly formed, and the backs were shaded
with crinkly reddish hair.  He wore a blue suit of woolly,
wide-waled serge; the traveling men had known at a glance
that it was made by a Denver tailor.  The doctor was al-
ways well dressed.

     Dr. Archie turned up the student's lamp and sat down in
the swivel chair before his desk.  He sat uneasily, beating
a tattoo on his knees with his fingers, and looked about him
as if he were bored.  He glanced at his watch, then absently
took from his pocket a bunch of small keys, selected one
and looked at it.  A contemptuous smile, barely percepti-
ble, played on his lips, but his eyes remained meditative.
Behind the door that led into the hall, under his buffalo-
skin driving-coat, was a locked cupboard.  This the doctor
opened mechanically, kicking aside a pile of muddy over-
shoes.  Inside, on the shelves, were whiskey glasses and
decanters, lemons, sugar, and bitters.  Hearing a step in
the empty, echoing hall without, the doctor closed the cup-
board again, snapping the Yale lock.  The door of the
waiting-room opened, a man entered and came on into
the consulting-room.

     "Good-evening, Mr. Kronborg," said the doctor care-
lessly.  "Sit down."

     His visitor was a tall, loosely built man, with a thin
brown beard, streaked with gray.  He wore a frock coat, a
broad-brimmed black hat, a white lawn necktie, and steel-
rimmed spectacles.  Altogether there was a pretentious and
important air about him, as he lifted the skirts of his coat