use I have been a Patient. It is so much easier to be a doctor than
a patient. The doctor imagines what his prescriptions are like and what
they will do; he imagines, but the Patient _knows_.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XXXI.

SOME noble physicians have tried the effect of drugs upon themselves in
order to advance their art; for this they have received Gold Medals, and
are alluded to as Benefactors of Mankind.

I have tried the effects of forty prescriptions upon My Person. With the
various combinations, patent medicines, and so forth, the total would, I
verily believe, reach eighty drugs.

Consequently, it is clear I ought to receive eighty gold medals. I am a
Benefactor eighty times multiplied; the incarnation of virtue; a sort of
Buddha, kiss my knees, ye slaves!

I have a complaisant feeling as I walk about that I have thus done more
good than any man living.

I am still very ill.

The curious things an invalid is gravely recommended to try! One day I
was sitting in that great cosmopolitan museum, the waiting-room at
Charing Cross station, wearily glancing from time to time at the clock,
and reckoning how long it would be before I could get home. There is
nothing so utterly tiring to the enfeebled as an interview with a London
physician. So there I sat, huddled of a heap, quite knocked up, and, I
suppose, must have coughed from time to time. By-and-by, a tall
gentleman came across the room and sat down beside me. "I hope I don't
intrude," said he, in American accents. "I was obliged to come and speak
to you--you look bad. I _hate_ to hear anybody cough." He put an
emphasis on hate, a long-drawn nasal _haate_, hissing it out with
unmeasured ferocity. "I _haate_ to hear anybody cough. Now I should like
to tell you how to cure it, if you don't mind."

"By all means--very interesting," I replied.

"I was bad at home, in the States," said he. "I was on my back four
years with a cough. I couldn't do anything--couldn't help myself; four
years, and I got down to eighty-seven pounds. That's a fact, I weighed
eighty-seven pounds."

"Very little," I said, looking him over; he was tall and
broad-shouldered, not very thick, a square-set man.

"I tried everything the doctors recommended--it was no use; they had to
give me up. At last a man cured me; and how do you think he did it?"

"Can't think--should much like to know."

"Crude petroleum," said the American. "That was it. Crude pet