was none of my business. They expected to pay, and they came to me in
preference to the dispensary doctor, two or three squares away, who
seemed to me to spend most of his days in the lanes and alleys about us.
Of course he received no pay except experience, since the dispensaries
in the Quaker City, as a rule, do not give salaries to their doctors;
and the vilest of the poor prefer a "pay doctor" to one of these
disinterested gentlemen, who cannot be expected to give their best
brains for nothing, when at everybody's beck and call. I am told, indeed
I know, that most young doctors do a large amount of poor practice, as
it is called; but, for my own part, I think it better for both parties
when the doctor insists upon some compensation being made to him. This
has been usually my own custom, and I have not found reason to regret
it.

Notwithstanding my strict attention to my own interests, I have been
rather sorely dealt with by fate upon several occasions, where, so far
as I could see, I was vigilantly doing everything in my power to keep
myself out of trouble or danger. I may as well relate one of them,
merely to illustrate of how little value a man's intellect may be when
fate and the prejudices of the mass of men are against him.

One evening, late, I myself answered a ring at the bell, and found a
small black boy on the steps, a shoeless, hatless little wretch, curled
darkness for hair, and teeth like new tombstones. It was pretty cold,
and he was relieving his feet by standing first on one and then on the
other. He did not wait for me to speak.

"Hi, sah, Missey Barker she say to come quick away, sah, to Numbah 709
Bedford street."

The locality did not look like pay, but it is hard to say in this
quarter, because sometimes you found a well-to-do "brandy-snifter"
(local for gin-shop) or a hard-working "leather-jeweler" (ditto for
shoemaker), with next door, in a house better or worse, dozens of human
rats for whom every police trap in the city was constantly set.

With a doubt in my mind as to whether I should find a good patient or
some dirty nigger, I sought the place to which I had been directed.
I did not like its looks; but I blundered up an alley and into a back
room, where I fell over somebody, and was cursed and told to lie down
and keep easy, or somebody, meaning the man stumbled over, would make
me. At last I lit on a staircase which led into the alley, and, after
much useless inquiry, got as high