other.

I was never what is called a good patient, and to this day I am very
much averse to sending for the doctor. I quite feel he indeed is a
friend in need, and I do not wish to disparage his power for good, or to
underrate his skill and judgment, but as a rule I make a point of not
calling him in till I know what I want him to say. I think that doctors
nowadays are more agreeable than they were formerly; the great and
fashionable doctors, I mean. A man, to be up to date, had to be brief,
brusque, and bumptious. He seemed to have learnt his stronger English
from Dr. Johnson, and generally to have been trained in a Johnsonian
atmosphere. He had to say smart things that could be quoted and hawked
about, and to enunciate wise saws in imitation of the master whose
sayings are so unmercifully inflicted on us to this day. He was in a
hurry; he drove up in a big yellow carriage, and before the horses could
pull up, his tiger had sprung from the footboard, and was giving the
most tremendous double-knock, one evidently meant to awaken the dead, in
case medical assistance had come too late.

To pass muster, the doctor's natural kindness had to be concealed
beneath an outer coating of apparent roughness. Sometimes it was the
roughness that was concealed only by a transparent veneer of amiability.
Certain it is that in those days no doctor could look at a boy's tongue
without at once declaring that he stood in immediate need of a black
dose, and if that vile compound did not exceed every other mixture in
nastiness, he did not believe it would be efficacious. He revelled in
blue pills, and was happiest when he could pull out a little lancet and
bleed you, or send round a man with a complete set of sharp blades, to
do the thing wholesale, jerking them into some part of your precious
self, and pumping a given number of ounces out of it and into his
cupping-glasses.

All this is very ungrateful of me, for Dr. Stone was the best and
kindest of men--and very undutiful, for he was my godfather (Felix Stone
is my full name). To be sure he had a big yellow carriage, and a tiger
whose main ambition in life it seemed to be to knock his master's
patients up. To be sure Dr. Stone came coated with a veneer of
roughness, but it was skin-deep; true, he gave me as many black doses
and blue pills as he thought my robust constitution could stand, but in
addition to these he made me many beautiful presents--a silver mug
emblazoned with our famil