“There, you are down. Too drunk to stand up;” and the policeman helped him to his feet again, and walked him along towards the station.
“No, sir. There you are wrong again; it’s stocks that’s down. It’s the stockholders—hic—that’s staggering along; they’ve fallen and skinned their noses on the curb-stone of adversity. There! don’t you see them—crawling along?”
“O, you’ve got the tremens. Come on,” exclaimed the policeman.
“Me? No; it’s the shorts and bears what’s got the dol—hic—lar—tremens. I’ve caught the pan—hics—panics, sir; that’s all.”
The policeman thrust the money-maniac into a cell, and the last seen of him he leaned back against the wall, his feet braced out, while, hatless and the knot of his cravat round under his left ear, he stood arguing the money-market with an imaginary broker on the opposite side of his cell.
An “Eye-opener.”
“How much do you charge, sir?” asked a poor farmer, from Framingham, of a city doctor, who had just wiped a bit of dust from the eye of his son.
“Twenty-five dollars, if you please,” was the modest reply.
“I cannot pay it, sir,” said the poor man. “It only took you a half minute. Our doctor was not at home; but I didn’t think you would charge me much, sir.”
So the M. D. very benevolently (?) accepted ten dollars—all the poor man had.