A CALL ON THE VILLAGE DOCTOR.
I knew another, kind, benevolent old doctor, who started off immediately on a call, without adding to or changing his dress. I once saw him seven miles from home in his shirt sleeves in November, driving fiercely along in his gig, as dignified as though dressed in his Sunday coat. If a friend reminded him of his omission, he would smile benevolently, swear as cordially, and drive on. He did not mean to be odd, he did not mean to swear; and the minister, who had talked with him on the subject more than once, had come to that charitable conclusion—for the doctor always made due acknowledgment, and did not forget the contributions and salaries. The doctor was like an innocent old backwoods deacon we have heard of, who, chancing at a village tavern for the first time, heard some extraordinary swearing; and being fascinated by this new accomplishment, he went home, and looking about for an opportunity to put to practical use the new vocabulary, he finally electrified his amiable wife by exclaiming,—
“Lord-all-hell, wife; shut the doors by a dam’ sight!”
PHYSICIANS COSTUME IN 1790.
In regard to shirts, a reliable author tells us that Dr. H. Davy adopted the following plan to save time. “He affected not to have time for the ordinary decencies of the toilet. Cold ablutions neither his constitution nor his philosophic temperament required; so he rarely ever washed himself. But the most remarkable fact was on the plea of saving time. When one shirt became too indecently dirty to be seen longer he used to put a clean one on over it; also the same with stockings and drawers. By spring he would look like the ‘metamorphosis man’ in the circus—big and rotund.
“On rare occasions he would divest himself of his superfluous stock of linen, which occasion was a feast to the washerwoman, but it was a source of perplexity to his less intimate friends, who could not account for his sudden transition from corpulency to tenuity.”
The doctor’s stock of shirts must have equalled Stanford’s.
A California paper tells us that “twenty years ago Leland Stanford arrived in that state with only one shirt to his back. Since then, by close attention to business, he has contrived to accumulate a trifle of ten million.”