ct families, but you
speak as if you had a dozen."

"I have, but not so large a number as I should like. I could take care
of fifteen or twenty more without: having to work too hard."

"Why, Doctor, you are as bad as a Mormon. What do you mean by calling
certain families yours?"

"Don't you speak about my client? Don't your clients call you their
lawyer? Does n't your baker, does n't your butcher, speak of the
families he supplies as his families?"

To be sure, yes, of course they do; but I had a notion that a man had as
many doctors as he had organs to be doctored."

"Well, there is some truth in that; but did you think the old-fashioned
family doctor was extinct, a fossil like the megatherium?"

"Why, yes, after the recent experience of a friend of mine, I did begin
to think that there would soon be no such personage left as that same
old-fashioned family doctor. Shall I tell you what that experience was?"

The young Doctor said he should be mightily pleased to hear it. He was
going to be one of those old-fogy practitioners himself.

"I don't know," the Counsellor said, "whether my friend got all the
professional terms of his story correctly, nor whether I have got them
from him without making any mistakes; but if I do make blunders in some
of the queer names, you can correct me. This is my friend's story:

"My family doctor," he said, "was a very sensible man, educated at a
school where they professed to teach all the specialties, but not
confining himself to any one branch of medical practice. Surgical
practice he did not profess to meddle with, and there were some classes
of patients whom he was willing to leave to the female physician. But
throughout the range of diseases not requiring exceptionally skilled
manual interference, his education had authorized him to consider
himself, and he did consider himself, qualified to undertake the
treatment of all ordinary cases--It so happened that my young wife was
one of those uneasy persons who are never long contented with their
habitual comforts and blessings, but always trying to find something a
little better, something newer, at any rate. I was getting to be near
fifty years old, and it happened to me, as it not rarely does to people
at about that time of life, that my hair began to fall out. I spoke of
it to my doctor, who smiled, said it was a part of the process of
reversed evolution, but might be retarded a little, and gave me a
prescription. I did not