It was a mild October evening, with a smoky blue haze, through which a single star shone over the clipped box in Dr. Theophilus Pry's garden, when I opened the iron gate and went softly along the pebbled walk to the square little office standing detached from the house. A black servant, carrying a plate of waffles from the outside kitchen, informed me in a querulous voice that the doctor was still at supper, but I might go in and wait; and accepting the suggestion with more amiability than accompanied it, I entered the small, cheerful room, where a lamp, with a lowered wick, burned under a green shade. Around the walls there were many ancient volumes in bindings of stout English calf, and on the mantelpiece, above which hung one of the original engravings of Latane's "Burial," two enormous glass jars, marked "Calomel" and "Quinine," presided over the apartment with an air of medicinal solemnity. They were the only visible and positive evidence of the doctor's calling in life, and when I knew him better in after years, I discovered that they were the only drugs he admitted to a place in the profession of healing. To the day of his death, he administered these alternatives with a high finality and an imposing presence. It was told of him that he considered but one symptom, and this he discovered with his hand on the patient's pulse and his eyes on a big loud-ticking watch in a hunting case. If the pulse was quick, he prescribed quinine, if sluggish, he ordered calomel. To dally with minor ailments was as much beneath him as to temporise with modern medicine. In his last years he was still suspicious of vaccination, and entertained a profound contempt for the knife. Beyond his faith in calomel and quinine, there were but two articles in his creed; he believed first in cleanliness, secondly in God. "Madam," he is reported to have remarked irreverently to a mother whom he found praying for her child's recovery in the midst of a dirty house, "when God doesn't respond to prayer, He sometimes answers a broom and a bucket of soapsuds." Honest, affable, adored, he presented the singular spectacle of a physician who scorned medicine, and yet who, it was said, had fewer deaths and more recoveries to his credit than any other practitioner of his generation. This belief arose probably in the legendary glamour which resulted from his boundless, though mysterious, charities; for despite the fact that he had until his death a large and devoted following, he lived all his life in a condition of genteel poverty. His single weakness was, I believe, an utter inability to appreciate the exchange value of dollars and cents; and this failing grew upon him so rapidly in his declining years that Mrs. Clay, his widowed sister, who kept his house, was at last obliged to "put up pickles" for the market in order to keep a roof over her brother's distinguished head.
I was sitting in one of the worn leather chairs under the green lamp, when the door opened and shut quickly, and Dr. Theophilus Pry came in and held out his hand.
"So you're the lad George was telling me about," he began at once, with a charming, straightforward courtesy. "I hope I haven't kept you waiting many minutes, sir."
He was spare and tall, with stooping shoulders, a hooked nose, bearing a few red veins, and a smile that lit up his face like the flash of a lantern. Everything about his clothes that could be coloured was of a bright, strong red; his cravat, his big silk handkerchief, and the polka dots in his black stockings. "Yes, I like any colour as long as it's red," he was fond of saying with his genial chuckle.
Bending over the green baize cloth on the table, he pushed away a pile of examination papers, and raised the wick of the lamp.
"So you've started out to learn Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by heart," he observed. "Now by a fair calculation how long do you suppose it will take you?"
I replied with diffidence that it appeared to me now as if it would very likely take me till the Day of Judgment.
"Well, 'tis as good an occupation as most, and a long ways better than some," commented the doctor. "You've come to me, haven't you, because you think you'd like to learn a little Latin?"
"I'd like to learn anything, sir, that will help me to get on."
"What's the business?"