e this powder three times a
day with your meals. It is just a case of too much tobacco supplemented
by a fertile fancy. Rub your chest with this before you go to bed and
avoid draughts. And what you need is not medicine but the active
agitation for two hours every day of the two legs which the Lord gave
you, and which you now employ exclusively for making your way to and
from the railway station. This is for your digestion, and you can have
it put up in pills or in liquid form, according to taste. And the next
time you feel inclined to call me in, think it over in the course of a
ten-mile walk."

Now this may be cheering if somewhat mixed treatment, but it has nothing
of that sympathy which the ailing body craves. The case is much worse if
your smooth-faced physician happens to be a personal friend. The
indifference with which such a man will listen to the most pitiful
recital of physical suffering is extraordinary. You may be out on the
golf links together, and he has just made an exceptionally fine iron
shot from a bad lie and in the face of a lively breeze. He is naturally
pleased, and you take courage from the situation. "By the way, Smith,"
you say, "I have been feeling rather queer for a day or two. There is a
gnawing sensation right here, and when I stoop----" "That must have been
180 yards," he says, "but not quite on the green. You don't chew your
food enough. Take a glass of hot water before your breakfast--and you
had better try your mashie!" Of course, no one likes to talk shop,
especially on the golf links. Still you think, if you were a physician
and you had a friend who had a gnawing sensation, you would be more
considerate. After the game he lights his cigar and orders you not to
smoke if the pain in your chest is really what you have described it.
"In me," he says, cheerfully, "you get a physician and a horrible
example for one price."

But there is one thing that this impressionistic school of medicine has
in common with the other kind. Both types are faithful to the funereal
type of waiting-room which is one of the signs of the trade. It is a
room in which all the arts of the undertaker have seemingly been called
upon to bring out the full possibilities of the average New York
brownstone "front-parlour." I have often tried to decide whether, in a
doctor's waiting-room, night or day was more conducive to thoughts of
the grave. At night a lamp flickers dimly in one corner of the long
room, and the sha