"Yes," I retorted, "I told you so, but I didn't stand agape all the time I was thinking it out. I took the temperature of the woman's armpits, and the back of her neck, and between her toes. I asked her about her breakfast, and her dinner, and her supper of the day before. Then I took a turn at her sleeping powers, and whether she had been eating too many vegetables lately. I inquired if she had had the measles, and the whooping-cough, and how often she had been vaccinated. I was just going to begin on her father, mother, and collateral relatives in order to trace hereditary tendencies, when I made up my mind that it would be safest to treat the woman for scarlet fever."
"Yes," said Peterson, drily, "Job was praising you up to the skies this very day. 'There never was sic a careful doctor,' he swears; 'there wasna a blessed thing that he didna speer into, even unto the third and fourth generation.'"
"There, you hear, Peterson," I said, with sober triumph, "that is the first step in your profession. You must create confidence. Never let them think for a moment you don't know everything. Why, old Ned Harper sent for me to-day—said you didn't understand the case, because you declined to prescribe."
"He is malingering," cried Peterson, hotly; "he only wants to draw full pay out of his two benefit societies. The man is a fraud, open and patent. I wouldn't have anything to do with him."
"Now, Peterson," I said, very seriously, "once for all, this is my practice, 'not yours. You are my salaried assistant. That is what you have to attend to. You are not revising auditor of the local benefit societies. If you do as you did with old Harper a time or two, you will lose me my appointment as Society's doctor, and not that one appointment alone. They all follow each other like a flock of sheep jumping through a slap in a dyke. Besides, the Benefit Society officials don't thank you, not a bit! They expect Harper to do as much for them the next time they feel like taking a holiday between the sheets!"
"What would you do then?" cried this furious young apostle of righteousness. "You surely would not have me become art and part in a swindle."
I patted him on the shoulder.
"Temper your zeal with discretion, my friend," I said. "I have found a rising blister between the shoulder-blades very efficacious in such cases."
Yet my immaculate assistant, had he only known it, was to go further and fare worse.
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