, and held
out his hand to the Indian girl. She drew her robe modestly about her bosom and went up to the man, timid but pleasantly.
I knew no more of this Doctor, or his name, than of the other men around me.
He came into the camp as a doctor, and had pill bags and a book or two, and was called The Doctor.
Had another doctor come, he would have been called Doctor Brown, or Smith, or Jones, provided that neither of these names, or the name given him by the camp, was the name given him by his parents. I know a doctor who wore the first beaver hat into a camp, and was called Doctor Tile. He could not get rid of that name. If he had died in that camp, Doctor Tile would have been the name written on the pine board at his head.
I can hardly account for this habit of nick-naming men in the mines. Maybe it was done in the interest of those who really desired and felt the need of a change of name. No doubt it was a convenient thing for many ; but for this wholesale re-naming of men, I see no sufficient reason. Possibly it was because these men, in civilization, had become tired of Col. William Higginson, The Hon. George H. Fer guson, Major Alfred Percival Brown, and so on to the end and exhaustion of handles and titles of men, and determined out here to have it their own way, to set up a sort of democracy in the matter of names.
" I will bake some bread, Doctor, for my babies ;"
