The Ottawa Free Trader

NIRVANA.

"It is an unusually severe case of hypo," said the doctor, gravely. He was young and much interested in the patient's daughter, a young and pretty girl.

"Is it a dangerous disease?" asked the young lady.

"No," said the doctor, suppressing a tendency to laugh. "Keep him cheerful and happy. In other words, take him where Nirvana is, and rest." The doctor had dabbled a little in esoteric philosophy. Buddhism was his hobby at that moment. He was much interested in this father and daughter who had been spending the season at the little town where he had just hung out his professional card.

"Oh, thank you, doctor!" and the blue eyes were lifted with glad confidence to the young doctor's rugged face. "If papa gets well we will owe it all to you."

"I shall not be here again for a week, as I am going out of town, but the moment I return I will call to see how your father is doing," answered the doctor, ignoring, with becoming modesty, the young lady's allusion to himself.

"But we may both be in Nirvana by that time," she responded.

"So much the better," laughed the doctor; "I often go there myself."

When the physician was gone Effie Harkins hurried into her father's room. At sight of the pale, morose face of her beloved parent, her heart smote her for neglecting him, and the doctor's diagnosis of the disease returned to her with alarming force.

"Papa, dear," she said, in her gentlest tones, "did he tell you what it was?"

"No!" ejaculated the invalid with considerable force for a sick man. "What is it? Consumption? Apoplexy? Heart disease? Out with it—I can stand anything better than suspense. What is it, girl?"

His tragic manner really frightened poor Effie out of her senses, but she managed to gasp:

"The doctor says it's h-h-hypo!"

"Hypo! The d—l!" retorted her father; "that's as much as to say I am making believe sick and paying out my money for nothing. He must be a fool!"

"Then it won't kill you, dear," said his affectionate daughter, sitting down by him and taking his hand in hers; "and he said, papa, that we must go to Nirvana."

"Where the dickens is Nirvana?" asked the sick man, with energy.

"Why, I thought you would know, dear."

"Well, I don't. Sounds like a mining town. It's probably away up in the northern peninsula in the lumber region. Get railroad guide, or an almanac, or something, and find out."

Effie flew round after the fugitive literature of travelers, but she could not find any such place. Her father fretted and fumed, and sent her to all the depots in town, to the post-office, and every other place, but no such name as Nirvana appeared upon any chart of travel or business. Then, at Effie's suggestion, a note was sent to the doctor, her father dictating it, and she writing in his name with a distractingly pretty feminine hand. The last thing in it was the question "Where is Nirvana?" and it appeared in a postscript as an unimportant after-thought.

The doctor answered the note, although he received it on the very day he was returning home, and he said carelessly, after replying to the main question involved, that Nirvana was not a place but a state.

This was a surprise. Mr. Harkins flew into a rage.

"As if I didn't know the name of the States!" he said; "if it's anything it's a territory—State, indeed," and the sick man ran over the entire list of thirty-eight States to satisfy Effie, who could not have told for her life whether Nirvana was a State or not.

When the doctor returned he waited a day or two before calling on his patient. He did this as a salutary measure, denying himself the most urgent desire of his life. When he did call he found the sick man up, a wholesome flush of health and energy in his face, and seated at a table on which railway guides, geographies and tourist books were piled in a promiscuous heap.

"Glad to see you, doctor," he said, brusquely, as Effie ushered in the man of science. "I'd have been off before this if I could have found that infer—I mean, that place you told us about."

The doctor looked conscious.

"It isn't a place; I thought I wrote you that. It's a state—a—"

"But I tell you it isn't a state," retorted the invalid. "I've got every State and Territory on the list right here before me. Now, find me that Nirvana if you can."

"It is an imaginary state." The doctor vowed inwardly he would never air his learning again. "A state of annihilation to which the Buddhists consign souls. I—I—only used it figuratively when I told Miss Effie to take you there. It is a common thing for a—a—physician to say 'go to Nirvana!'"

But Mr. Harkins was furious. "Go to Halifax!" he snarled. "Send in your bill. I want no trifling treatment like that."

But here Effie, who had been laughing soundlessly in the next room, came to the rescue.

"It is a capital joke, papa, and it all happened through our ignorance. I am going right to work to study the doctor's geography. Why, it has cured you already by giving you something to think about."

The doctor is married now, and his home is one of the pleasantest places in life. There, when the day is over, a sweet, blue-eyed woman sits at the piano and sings softly to two listeners, a song that sometimes moves them to laughter and sometimes to tears:

"Heart, oh! wild heart: why in the storm-world raging.
Putting the bon thus midway passion's share and jest,
When all so near, above, below
Montana mutter."