nd the only thing that I
could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had
scarlet fever.

[Picture: Man with walking stick] I had walked into that reading-room a
happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse,
and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing,
when I fancy I'm ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to
him now. "What a doctor wants," I said, "is practice. He shall have me.
He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your
ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each." So
I went straight up and saw him, and he said:

"Well, what's the matter with you?"

I said:

"I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the
matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had
finished. But I will tell you what is _not_ the matter with me. I have
not got housemaid's knee. Why I have not got housemaid's knee, I cannot
tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else,
however, I _have_ got."

And I told him how I came to discover it all.

Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and
then he hit me over the chest when I wasn't expecting it--a cowardly
thing to do, I call it--and immediately afterwards butted me with the
side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription,
and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.

I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist's, and handed it in.
The man read it, and then handed it back.

He said he didn't keep it.

I said:

"You are a chemist?"

He said:

"I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel
combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers
me."

I read the prescription. It ran:

"1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pt. bitter beer

every 6 hours.

1 ten-mile walk every morning.

1 bed at 11 sharp every night.

And don't stuff up your head with things you don't understand."

I followed the directions, with the happy result--speaking for
myself--that my life was preserved, and is still going on.

In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill circular, I had the
symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among