ver refuses a patient and never sends
a bill. He swears there isn't enough knowledge in his profession to make
it worth anybody's money."

"And where does he live?"

"In that little old house with the office in the yard on Franklin
Street. The General says you're to go to him this evening at eight
o'clock."

The sound of my beating heart was so loud in my ears that I hurriedly
buttoned my jacket across it. Then as if I were to be examined on
Johnson's Dictionary, my lips began to move silently while I spelled
over the biggest words. If I could only confine my future conversations
to the use of the _a_'s and _b_'s, I felt that I might safely pass
through life without desperate disaster in the matter of speech.

It was a mild October evening, with a smoky blue haze, through which a
single star shone over the clipped box in Dr. Theophilus Pry's garden,
when I opened the iron gate and went softly along the pebbled walk to
the square little office standing detached from the house. A black
servant, carrying a plate of waffles from the outside kitchen, informed
me in a querulous voice that the doctor was still at supper, but I might
go in and wait; and accepting the suggestion with more amiability than
accompanied it, I entered the small, cheerful room, where a lamp, with a
lowered wick, burned under a green shade. Around the walls there were
many ancient volumes in bindings of stout English calf, and on the
mantelpiece, above which hung one of the original engravings of Latane's
"Burial," two enormous glass jars, marked "Calomel" and "Quinine,"
presided over the apartment with an air of medicinal solemnity. They
were the only visible and positive evidence of the doctor's calling in
life, and when I knew him better in after years, I discovered that they
were the only drugs he admitted to a place in the profession of healing.
To the day of his death, he administered these alternatives with a high
finality and an imposing presence. It was told of him that he considered
but one symptom, and this he discovered with his hand on the patient's
pulse and his eyes on a big loud-ticking watch in a hunting case. If the
pulse was quick, he prescribed quinine, if sluggish, he ordered calomel.
To dally with minor ailments was as much beneath him as to temporise
with modern medicine. In his last years he was still suspicious of
vaccination, and entertained a profound contempt for the knife. Beyond
his faith in calomel and quinine, there