ery thing, if you can read and
write." "Sir," replied I, "if that is all you require, I am your man."
"In that case," rejoined he, "we need look no further. Come home with
me: it will be all comfort; I shall behave to you like a brother. You
will have no wages, but everything will be found you. You shall eat
and drink according to the true faith, and be taught to cure all
diseases. In a word, you shall rather be my young Sangrado than my
footman."

[Footnote 32: From "Gil Blas," which is perhaps as well known in
English as in French, innumerable translations having been made. The
best known is the one by Tobias Smollett, which has survived in favor
to the present time. A translation by P. Proctor appeared in 1774, one
by Martin Smart in 1807, and one by Benjamin H. Malkin in 1809.]

I closed in with the doctor's proposal, in the hope of becoming an
Esculapius under so inspired a master. He carried me home on the spur
of the occasion, to install me in my honorable employment; which
honorable employment consisted in writing down the name and residence
of the patients who sent for him in his absence. There had indeed been
a register for this purpose, kept by an old domestic; but she had not
the gift of spelling accurately, and wrote a most perplexing hand.
This account I was to keep. It might truly be called a bill of
mortality; for my members all went from bad to worse during the short
time they continued in this system. I was a sort of bookkeeper for the
other world, to take places in the stage, and to see that the first
come were the first served. My pen was always in my hand, for Doctor
Sangrado had more practise than any physician of his time in
Valladolid. He had got into reputation with the public by a certain
professional slang, humored by a medical face, and some extraordinary
cases more honored by implicit faith than scrupulous investigation.

He was in no want of patients, nor consequently of property. He did
not keep the best house in the world: we lived with some little
attention to economy. The usual bill of fare consisted of peas,
beans, boiled apples or cheese. He considered this food as best suited
to the human stomach; that is to say, as most amenable to the
grinders, whence it was to encounter the process of digestion.
Nevertheless, easy as was their passage, he was not for stopping the
way with too much of them; and to be sure, he was in the right. But
tho he cautioned the maid and me against repleti