ome I moved my medical text-books, a few bones,
and myself. Also, I displayed in the window a fresh sign, upon which was
distinctly to be read:

DR. E. SANDERAFT. Office hours, 8 to 9 A.M., 7 to 9 P.M.

I felt now that I had done my fair share toward attaining a virtuous
subsistence, and so I waited tranquilly, and without undue enthusiasm,
to see the rest of the world do its part in the matter. Meanwhile I
read up on all sorts of imaginable cases, stayed at home all through my
office hours, and at intervals explored the strange section of the town
which lay to the south of my office. I do not suppose there is anything
like it else where. It was then filled with grog-shops, brothels,
slop-shops, and low lodging-houses. You could dine for a penny on soup
made from the refuse meats of the rich, gathered at back gates by a
horde of half-naked children, who all told varieties of one woeful tale.
Here, too, you could be drunk for five cents, and be lodged for three,
with men, women, and children of all colors lying about you. It was this
hideous mixture of black and white and yellow wretchedness which made
the place so peculiar. The blacks predominated, and had mostly
that swollen, reddish, dark skin, the sign in this race of habitual
drunkenness. Of course only the lowest whites were here--rag-pickers,
pawnbrokers, old-clothes men, thieves, and the like. All of this, as it
came before me, I viewed with mingled disgust and philosophy. I hated
filth, but I understood that society has to stand on somebody, and I was
only glad that I was not one of the undermost and worst-squeezed bricks.

I can hardly believe that I waited a month without having been called
upon by a single patient. At last a policeman on our beat brought me a
fancy man with a dog-bite. This patient recommended me to his brother,
the keeper of a small pawnbroking-shop, and by very slow degrees I began
to get stray patients who were too poor to indulge in up-town doctors.
I found the police very useful acquaintances; and, by a drink or a cigar
now and then, I got most of the cases of cut heads and the like at the
next station-house. These, however, were the aristocrats of my practice;
the bulk of my patients were soap-fat men, rag-pickers, oystermen,
hose-house bummers, and worse, with other and nameless trades, men and
women, white, black, or mulatto. How they got the levies, fips, and
quarters with which I was reluctantly paid, I do not know; that, indeed,