nce sitting on the edge of his chair, or hers as the case
may be and so frequently is, with hands clutched in polite but painful
restraint, gills working up and down with impatience, eyes brightened
with desire, tongue hung in the middle, waiting for you to pause to
catch your breath, so that he or she may break in with a few personal
recollections along the same line. From a mere conversation it resolves
itself into a symptom symposium, and a perfectly splendid time is had by
all.

If an operation is such a good thing to talk about, why isn't it a good
thing to write about, too? That is what I wish to know. Besides, I need
the money. Verily, one always needs the money when one has but recently
escaped from the ministering clutches of the modern hospital. Therefore
I write.

It all dates back to the fair, bright morning when I went to call on
a prominent practitioner here in New York, whom I shall denominate as
Doctor X. I had a pain. I had had it for days. It was not a dependable,
locatable pain, such as a tummyache or a toothache is, which you can
put your hand on; but an indefinite, unsettled, undecided kind of pain,
which went wandering about from place to place inside of me like a
strange ghost lost in Cudjo's Cave. I never knew until then what the
personal sensations of a haunted house are. If only the measly thing
could have made up its mind to settle down somewhere and start light
housekeeping I think should have been better satisfied. I never had such
an uneasy tenant. Alongside of it a woman with the moving fever would be
comparatively a fixed and stationary object.

Having always, therefore, enjoyed perfectly riotous and absolutely
unbridled health, never feeling weak and distressed unless dinner
happened to be ten or fifteen minutes late, I was green regarding
physicians and the ways of physicians. But I knew Doctor X slightly,
having met him last summer in one of his hours of ease in the grand
stand at a ball game, when he was expressing a desire to cut the
umpire's throat from ear to ear, free of charge; and I remembered his
name, and remembered, too, that he had impressed me at the time as being
a person of character and decision and scholarly attainments.

He wore whiskers. Somehow in my mind whiskers are ever associated
with medical skill. I presume this is a heritage of my youth, though I
believe others labor under the same impression.

As I look back it seems to me that in childhood's days all th