Why should I wish a new hat? I asked myself indignantly. True, mine had seen better days, but it was worth more to me now than a hundred new hats. "Yes, yes, you dear old weather-beaten tile," I apostrophized as I strode on with a deaf ear to my inquisitors, "you are of royal stuff, for you have triumphed over many wars and dissensions and still wear a crown! The plebeian hats who calumniate you, although fresh from a band-box, are common compared with you; they are jealous of your exploits and envy you your faithful friend."
"Vividly do I recall our desperate encounters with the mad bull, the hailstorms and other warring elements; and that winter's night when you forgot your personal safety and made a noble self-sacrifice by receiving the assailant's bullet intended for me; and, again, the day the awkward jackass tried to yank me off the plank foot-bridge underneath him in his fall, when you threw your own lean frame down on to the bank in place of me and received the weight which would have mashed me to death, but which only squeezed the wind out of you. Why do all the idle clerks gaze at you so longingly from the shop-windows? Because they covet you as a drawing card to disdaining shoppers. I am proud of you. Rest in peace."
I spent the night with friend Adams, on his invitation. Monday morning I kept my appointment with the patent medicine man. He received me cordially, evidently aware of the boon I might be to his business should I enter his employ, and in order that he might better discuss my proposition and its possibilities, he invited me some miles into the country for a couple of days' outing at a mineral spring resort.
A stylish coach and four met us at the train, and wheeled us over a pretty rolling country, in the glow of the setting sun, to the cozy hotel-sanitarium, which was brilliantly illuminated and whose doors were open to welcome us.
And in less than twenty minutes, Pod made of his Apollo form a companion piece to "Diana Bathing."
The water then sold at fifty cents a gallon and there were two hundred gallons in my tub. Think of it! I had read about beautiful actresses and heiresses taking milk baths and champagne baths and Rochelle salts baths, but that $100 bath of mine in pure lithia water would have put all those pretty bathing women to the blush. But when, in my enthusiasm, I so told my generous host, he spoiled all my beautiful delusions at once by saying quite mechanically, "Oh, two hundred gallons for a bath is nothing unusual; it's only the overflow."
Next morning he asked me if I would like a magno-mud bath. "Sir?" I interrogated, gravely. "If you had dragged and pushed and carried a stubborn, cantankerous donkey through four hundred miles of red and yellow Ohio mud, and two hundred miles of blue and black Indiana mud, not to mention some six hundred miles of New York and Pennsylvania mud of various hues and conditions, the overflows of December, January and February; if you had bathed in mud, waded in mud, soaked in mud and cursed in mud for nearly five months, and I were to put such a delicate question to you, your sensibilities would be shocked, your nerves paralyzed, your reason ossified."
My host apologized and withdrew the invitation; then with great wisdom and forethought, he introduced me to the physician, Dr. Tanner, the highest authority on fasting, and renowned for his having fasted forty days. I considered this the luckiest meeting of my whole journey. He took quite a fancy to me and gave me valuable instructions and prescriptions for fasting any period from one to forty days; but I was disappointed not to be enlightened on how to go several days without water.
That morning my host made me a liberal proposition to advertise his medicines, he guaranteeing to pay me a regular weekly stipend during the remainder of my pilgrimage to the Golden Gate, and, free of all charges, to provide me with all the photographs of my asinine outfit that I could sell en route. I signed the contract. Then we returned to Chicago.