He leads me in a little room to one side, and goes over me like a lawyer lookin' for a clause in a contract he can bust. He looks at my tongue till it begin to quiver from exposure to the air; he clocks my pulse at a mile, two miles and over the jumps; he stuck a telephone like you see in the foreign movies over my heart and listened in on the internal gossip for twenty minutes; he walloped me on the chest with the best he had and made me sing a song called "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!" Then he shakes his head and tells me to put on my coat.
"You're one of the healthiest specimens I ever examined!" he says. "There's absolutely nothing the matter with you."
"Well, that's certainly tough, doc," I tells him, "because I sure want to win one of them rooms like Scanlan has. I—wait a minute!" I hollers, gettin' a flash. "You didn't gimme the book test!"
I hops over to the desk and grabs up a book off it. It was a big thick one called "Paralysis to Pneumonia," and was written by a couple of Greeks named "Symptoms and Therapeutics." I never heard of the thing before, and I wished it had been "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or somethin' like that, but I took a chance.
"Here!" I says. "I don't know if this is the right one or not, but let's try it out on my knee, eh?"
I seen he didn't make me, so I explains about the nerve test I seen where some of the guys throwed out their legs when hit, and some of 'em didn't. He gimme the laugh then, and tells me to look out of the window. I did and they's a terrible crash in back of me, but I kept lookin' out like he told me. Then he says all right, I can turn around, and, when I did, I see the book case has fell over on the floor. He claims if I had been nervous, I would have jumped eighty feet when it crashed down and as they is nothin' the matter with me, I might as well be on my way. Well, I was up against it—but only for a minute. That last crack of his gimme an idea. I makes a leap across the floor, grabs my heart and starts to shake and shiver like a bum in one of them "Curse of Drink" productions.
"What's the matter?" he calls out.
I looks wildly around the room, and I seen a fly upside down on the window-sill tryin' to get to its feet.
"Oh!" I says. "I'm so nervous, doc, I'm shakin' like a crap-shooter. D'ye see that fly? Well, it must have fell off the window just then—it gimme an awful shock—y'know that sudden noise and—"
He throws up his hands.