were but two articles in his
creed; he believed first in cleanliness, secondly in God. "Madam," he is
reported to have remarked irreverently to a mother whom he found praying
for her child's recovery in the midst of a dirty house, "when God
doesn't respond to prayer, He sometimes answers a broom and a bucket of
soapsuds." Honest, affable, adored, he presented the singular spectacle
of a physician who scorned medicine, and yet who, it was said, had fewer
deaths and more recoveries to his credit than any other practitioner of
his generation. This belief arose probably in the legendary glamour
which resulted from his boundless, though mysterious, charities; for
despite the fact that he had until his death a large and devoted
following, he lived all his life in a condition of genteel poverty. His
single weakness was, I believe, an utter inability to appreciate the
exchange value of dollars and cents; and this failing grew upon him so
rapidly in his declining years that Mrs. Clay, his widowed sister, who
kept his house, was at last obliged to "put up pickles" for the market
in order to keep a roof over her brother's distinguished head.

I was sitting in one of the worn leather chairs under the green lamp,
when the door opened and shut quickly, and Dr. Theophilus Pry came in
and held out his hand.

"So you're the lad George was telling me about," he began at once, with
a charming, straightforward courtesy. "I hope I haven't kept you
waiting many minutes, sir."

He was spare and tall, with stooping shoulders, a hooked nose, bearing a
few red veins, and a smile that lit up his face like the flash of a
lantern. Everything about his clothes that could be coloured was of a
bright, strong red; his cravat, his big silk handkerchief, and the polka
dots in his black stockings. "Yes, I like any colour as long as it's
red," he was fond of saying with his genial chuckle.

Bending over the green baize cloth on the table, he pushed away a pile
of examination papers, and raised the wick of the lamp.

"So you've started out to learn Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by heart," he
observed. "Now by a fair calculation how long do you suppose it will
take you?"

I replied with diffidence that it appeared to me now as if it would very
likely take me till the Day of Judgment.

"Well, 'tis as good an occupation as most, and a long ways better than
some," commented the doctor. "You've come to me, haven't you, because
you think you'd like to learn a