found the gold?"

My father ran his hands into his pockets in a retrospective sort of way.

"In the mouths of my patients, every grain of it," said the dentist,
with a perfectly diabolical smack of the lips. "Old fillings--plugs, you
know--that I saved, and had made up into this shape. Good deal of
sentiment about such a ring as this."

"Sentiment of a mixed nature, I should say," murmured my father, with a
grimace.

"Mixed--rather! A speck here, a speck there. Sometimes an eye, oftener a
jaw, occasionally a front. More than a hundred men, I s'pose, have
helped in the cause."

"Law, doctor! you beats de birds, you does," cries Aunt Anniky, whose
head was as flat as the floor, where her reverence should have been.
"You know dey snatches de wool from ebery bush to make deir nests."

"Lots of company for me, that ring is," said the doctor, ignoring the
pertinent or impertinent interruption. "Often as I sit in the twilight,
I twirl it around and around, a-thinking of the wagon-loads of food it
has masticated, the blood that has flowed over it, the groans that it
has cost! Now, old lady, if you will sit just here."

He motioned Aunt Anniky to the chair, into which she dropped in a limp
sort of way, recovering herself immediately, however, and sitting bolt
upright in a rigid attitude of defiance. Some moments of persuasion were
necessary before she could be induced to lean back and allow Dr. Babb's
fingers on her nose while she breathed the laughing-gas; but, once
settled, the expression faded from her countenance almost as quickly as
a magic-lantern picture vanishes. I watched her nervously, my attention
divided between her vacant-looking face and a dreadful picture on the
wall. It represented Dr. Babb himself, minus the hair, but with double
the number of smiles, standing by a patient from whose mouth he had
apparently just extracted a huge molar that he held triumphantly in his
forceps. A gray-haired old gentleman regarded the pair with benevolent
interest. The photograph was entitled, "His First Tooth."

"Attracted by that picture?" said Dr. Alonzo, affably, his fingers on
Aunt Anniky's pulse. "My par had that struck off the first time I ever
got a tooth out. That's par with the gray hair and the benediction
attitude. Tell you, he was proud of me! I had such an awful tussle with
that tooth! Thought the old fellow's jaw was _bound_ to break! But I got
it out, and after that my par took me with him round the
count