anything was the matter with them, they
perseveringly 'kept on,' till it stopped, the disease retiring in
despair from their determination to be well. Fat parties, who ought to
have been dropsical, were not so at all--they grew fatter, and
flourished like green bay trees; lean persons, threatening to go off in
a decline, declining to do so, remained. Adventurous little boys,
falling from the tops of high trees to the stony ground, sustained no
injuries beyond the maternal chastisement and brandy-and-brown-paper of
home; babies defied croup and colic with the slender aid of 'Bateman's
Drops,' and 'Syrup of Squills,' dispensed by a wise grandma, and
children of mature years went through the popular infant disorders as
they went through their grammars, and with about as much result; mumps
and measles, chills and chicken pox, prevailed and disappeared without
medical assistance, and though all the children in the village whooped
like wild Indians, no anxious parent ever thought it necessary to call
in a physician. There was but one in the place before my advent, a
comfortable, elderly man, who selected the profession, as practised in
his native town, because it interfered less than any other with his
punctual habits of sleeping and eating, and was a gentlemanly sinecure,
possessing peculiar privileges. No patient of his ever dreamt of calling
him out at night, or keeping him away from his meals; the person to be
ill, chose a convenient hour between dinner and tea, and gave respectful
notice at a reasonable time beforehand. No extraordinary accidents,
requiring wonderful feats of surgery, were ever permitted in his
practice; no stranger shocked his nerves by dying suddenly at the
village hotel; no mysterious diseases, unknown of science, baffled his
skill, or defied it; the locality was too far south for bronchitis and
consumption, too far north for poisonous malaria fevers and _coups de
soleil_; and being inland, just inside the line of the coast scourges of
cholera and yellow Jack. In short, to quote the only epitaph in the
village churchyard, 'Physicians was in vain.'

It was a beautiful morning on which I took my way through this healthful
town--I mean, of course, professionally speaking, a very fine morning,
indeed. The air was warm and damp, as if laden with pleurisy and ague;
the ground soft and oozy, seemed a sure thing for rheumatism and
influenza. The sun unseasonably hot; fever and rush of blood to the
head. Old C