"Oh yes; I've turned it over in my mind. But I guess I won't. You see, my son, I'm so crammed full of information that if I began a discourse I could hardly stop under a couple of years; and that's too long for a lecture, you know. Then they might encore it; and so I hardly think I'd better go in. No, I'll just trudge along in the old fashion."
"Have you any views about the questions of the day? Are you in favor of soft money or hard?"
"Young man, the advice to you of a man who has studied the world for nearly two thousand years is to take any kind you can get. That's solid wisdom."
Then, as the old man babbled on, he descended from the fence, shouldered his umbrella, and together the two started for the ferry. He said he wanted to buy a new suit of clothes. That he had on he had bought in 1807 in Germany, and it was beginning to get threadbare. So the reporter led him over the river, put him in a horse-car, asked him to send his address to the office, and the aged pilgrim nudged up into a corner seat, put his valise on the floor and sailed serenely out of sight amid the reverberation of the oaths hurled by the driver at an Irish drayman who occupied the track in front of the car.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF DR. PERKINS.
It might be hardly fair to say that Doctor Perkins, a former resident of the village, was a quack; he may be described in milder phrase as an irregular practitioner. He belonged to none of the accepted schools, but treated his patients in accordance with certain theories of his own. The doctor had a habit of relating remarkable stories of his own achievements, and the most wonderful of these was his account of an attempt that he once made to cure a man named Simpson of consumption by the process of transfusion of blood. The doctor, according to his own story, determined to inject healthy blood into Simpson's veins.
As no human being was willing to shed his blood for Simpson, the doctor bled Simpson's goat; and opening a vein in Simpson's arm, he injected about two quarts of the blood into the patient's system. Simpson immediately began to revive, but, singular to relate, no sooner had his strength returned than he jumped out of bed; and twitching his head about after the fashion of a goat, he made a savage attempt to butt the doctor. That medical gentleman, after having Simpson's head plunged against his stomach three or four times, took refuge in the closet; whereupon Simpson banged his head against the panel of the door a couple of times, and would probably have broken it to splinters had not his mother-in-law entered at that moment and diverted his attention. One well-directed blow from Simpson floored her, and then, while she screamed for help, Simpson frolicked around over the floor, making assiduous efforts to nibble the green flowers in the ingrain carpet. When they called the hired man in and tied him down on the bed, an effort was made to interview him, but the only answer he could give to such questions as how he felt and when he wanted his medicine was a "ba-a" precisely like that of a goat, and then he would strain himself in an effort to butt a hole in the headboard. The condition of the patient was so alarming, and Mrs. Simpson was so indignant, that Dr. Perkins determined to undo the evil if possible. So he first bled Simpson freely, and then, by heavily bribing Simpson's Irishman, he procured fresh blood from him, and injected Simpson the second time. Simpson recovered, but he shocked his old Republican friends by displaying an irresistible tendency to vote the Democratic ticket, and made his mother-in-law mad by speaking with a strong brogue. He gradually gave up butting, and never indulged in it in a serious manner but once, and that was on a certain Sunday, when, one of the remaining corpuscles of goat's blood getting into his brain just as he was going into church, he butted the sexton halfway up the aisle, and only recovered himself sufficiently to apologize just as the enraged official was about to floor him with a hymn-book.
[Illustration: SIMPSON'S CASE]
But the doctor did not succeed with private practice in Millburg, and so one day he made up his mind to try to get out of poverty by inventing a patent medicine. After some reflection he concluded that the two most frequent and most unpopular forms of infirmity were baldness of head and torpidity of the liver, and he selected compounds recommended by the pharmacopoeia as the remedies which he would sell to the public. One he called "Perkins' Hair Vigor," and the other "Perkins' Liver Regulator." Procuring a large number of fancy bottles and gaudy labels, he bottled the medicines and advertised them extensively, with certificates of imaginary cures, which were written out for him by a friend whose liver was active and whose hair was abundant.