I found this story in "The Reader's Digest 20th Anniversary Anthology". It's a small 123 page book published in 1941. The following story, although old, is probably still owned by someone. Stretching the fair use doctrine, I will include it as a sample of a much larger CD of these types of stories which can be purchased here. If Phil wants to delete the following story then I understand. I hope you can all get a chance to read it first.

The Doctor of Lennox
By A.J. Cronin

The most unforgettable character I ever met? To my surprise I find myself thinking, not of some famous statesman, solider or tycoon, but of a simple soul who had no wish to dominate an empire, but set out instead to conquer circumstance�and himself.

I first knew him as a boy, small, insignificant and poor, who hung on to us, so to speak, by the skin of his teeth�barely accepted by the select band of adventurous youths of which I was one in my native Scottish town of Levenford.

If he were in any way remarkable, it was through his defects. He was quite comically lame, one leg being so much shorter than the other that he was obliged to wear a boot with a sole six inches thick. To see him run, saving his bad leg, his undersized form tense and limping, the sweat breaking out on his eager face, well�Chisholm, the minister's son, acknowledged wit of our band, hit the nail on the head when he dubbed him Dot-and-Carry. It was shortened subsequently to Carry. "Look out," someone would shout, "here comes Carry. Let's get away before he tags on to us." And off we would dart, to the swimming pool or the woods, with Carry, dotting along, cheerful and unprotesting, in our wake.

That was his quality, a shy, a smiling cheerfulness�and how we mocked it! To us, Carry was an oddity. His clothes, though carefully patched and mended, were terrible. Socially he was almost beyond the pale. His mother, a gaunt little widow of a drunken loafer, supported herself and her son by scrubbing out sundry shops. Again Chisholm epitomized the jest with his classic epigram, "Carry's mother takes in stairs to wash."

Carry supplemented the family income by rising at five o'clock every morning to deliver milk. This long milk round sometimes made him late for school. Glancing down the arches of the years, I can still see a small lame boy, hot and trembling, in the middle of the classroom, floor, while the master, a sadistic brute, drew titters with his shafts.

"Well, well�can it be possible ye're late again?"
"Y-y-yes, sir."
"And where has your lordship been? Taking breakfast with the provost no doubt?"
"N-n-n-n-"

At such moments of crisis Carry had a stammer which rose and tortured him. He could not articulate another syllable. And the class, reading permission in the master's grim smile, dissolved in roars of mirth.

If Carry had been clever, all might have been well for him. In Scotland everything is forgiven the brilliant "lad o' pairts." But though Carry did well enough at his books, oral examinations were to him the crack of doom.

There was heartburning in this fact for Carry's mother. She longed for her son to excel, and to excel in one especial field. Poor, humble, despised, she nourished in her fiercely religious soul a fervent ambition. She desired to see her son an ordained minister of the Church of Scotland. Sublime folly! But Carry's mother had sworn to achieve the miracle or die!

Carry much preferred the open countryside to a stuffy prayer meeting. He loved the woods and moors and the wild things that lived there�was never happier than when tending some sick or maimed creature picked up on his wanderings. He had a most uncanny knack of healing. In fact, Carry had a tremendous longing to be a doctor.

But obedience was inherent in his gentle nature, and when he left school it was to enter college as a student of divinity. Heaven knows how they managed. His mother scrimped and saved, her figure grew more gaunt, but in her deep-set eye there glowed unquenchable fire. Carry himself, though his heart was not in what he did, worked like a hero.

And so it happened, quicker than might have been imagined, that Carry was duly licensed at the age of 24 in the cure of souls according to the Kirk of Scotland. Locally there was great interest in the prodigy of the scrubwoman's son turned parson. He was proposed for the parish church assistantship and named to preach a trial sermon.

A full congregation assembled to see "what was in the young meenister." And Carry, who for weeks past had rehearsed his sermon, ascended the pulpit feeling himself word-perfect. He began to speak in an earnest voice and for a few moments he went well enough. Then all at once he became conscious of those rows and rows of upturned faces, of his mother dressed in her best in a front pew, her eyes fixed rapturously upon him. A paralyzing shiver of self-distrust swept over him. He hesitated, lost the thread of his ideas and began to stammer. Once that frightful impotence of speech had gripped him he was lost. He labored on pitifully, but while he struggled for the words he saw the restlessness, the significant smiles; heard even a faint titter. And then again he saw his mother's face, and broke down completely. There was a long and awful pause, then falteringly Carry drew the service to a close by announcing the hymn.

Within the hour, when Carry's mother reached home, she was mercifully taken by an apoplectic seizure. She never spoke again.

The funeral over, Carry disappeared from Levenford. No one knew or cared where he went. He was stigmatized, branded contemptuously for life, a failure. When some years later news reached me that he was teaching in a wretched school in a mining district, I thought of him for a moment, with a kind of shamefaced sorrow, as a despairing soul, a man predestined for disaster. But I soon forgot him.

I was working in Edinburgh when Chisholm, now first assistant to the Regius Professor of Anatomy there, dropped into my rooms one evening. "You'll never guess," he grinned, "who's dissecting in my department. None other than our boyhood friend, Dot-and-Carry."

Carry it was. Carry, at nearly 30 years of age, starting out to be a doctor! A strange figure he made, with his shabby suit, his limp and stoop, among the gay young bucks who were his fellow students. No one ever spoke to him. He occupied a room in a poor district, cooked his own meals, husbanded the slender savings from his teacher's pittance. I saw something of his struggle for the next two years. His age, appearance, and traitorous stammer hampered him. But he went plodding indefatigably on, refusing to admit defeat, the old dogged cheerfulness and hopeful courage still in his eyes.

Time marched on. Five years and more. I found myself in London, and had long since again lost touch with Carry. But I saw much of Chisholm, whose good looks and glib tongue had destined him for political honors. He was now indeed a Member of Parliament and a junior minister into the bargain. In May of 1934 I went with him for a fishing holiday at Lennox in the Highlands. The food at our inn was vile and the landlady a scrawny shrew. It was something of a satisfaction when, two days after our arrival, she slipped on the taproom floor and damaged her kneecap. Perfunctorily, we two renegades from the healing art offered our assistance. But the dame would have none of us. No one would suit but her own village doctor, of whose canny skill and notable achievements she drew an enthusiastic picture that made Chisholm glance at me and smile.

An hour later the practitioner arrived, black bag in hand, with all the quick assurance of a busy man. In no time he had silenced the patient with a reassuring word and reduced the dislocation with a sure, deft touch. Only then did he turn toward us.

"My God!" exclaimed Chisholm, under his breath. "Carry!"

Yes, Carry it was. But not the shy, shabby, stammering Carry of old. He had the quietly confident air of a man established and secure. In a flash of recognition he greeted us warmly, and pressed us to come to supper at his home. Meanwhile, he had an urgent case to attend.

It was with an odd expectancy, half excitement and half lingering misgiving, that we entered the village doctor's house that evening. What a shock to find that Carry had a wife! Yet it was so. She welcomed us, fresh and pretty as her own countryside. Since the doctor (she gave the title a na�ve reverence) was still engaged in his surgery, she took us upstairs to see the children. Two red-cheeked girls and a little boy, already asleep. Surprise made us mute.

Downstairs, Carry joined us with two other guests. Now, at his own table, he was a man poised and serene, holding his place as host with quiet dignity. His friends, both men of substance, treated him with deference. Less from what he said than what was said by others we gathered the facts. His practice was wide and scattered. His patients were country folk, canny, silent, hard to know. Yet somehow he had won them. Now as he went through a village the women would run to him, babe in arms, to consult him in the roadway. Such times he never bothered about fees. More than enough came his way, and at New Year there was always a string of presents on his doorstep, a brace of ducks, a goose, a clutch of new-laid eggs, in handsome settlement for some quite forgotten service.

But there were other tales�of midnight vigils when in some humble home the battle for a human life was waged: a child, choking with diphtheria, a plowman stricken with pneumonia, a shepherd's wife in painful labor, all to be sustained, comforted, exhorted, brought back haltingly, their hands in his, from the shadows.

The doctor was a force now, permeating the whole countryside, wise and gentle, blending the best of science and nature, unsparing, undemanding, loving this work he had been born to do, conscious of the place that he had won in the affections of the people, a man who had refused defeat and won through to victory at last.

Late that night as we left the doctor's house and trudged through the darkness, silence fell between Chisholm and myself. Then, as with an effort, he declared:

"It looks as though the little man has found himself at last."

Something patronizing in the remark jarred me. I could not resist a quick reply.

"Which would you rather be, Chisholm�yourself, or the doctor of Lennox?"

"Confound you," he muttered. "Don�t you know?"