ain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had
scarlet fever.

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 afterward 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?"

"I am a chemist. If I was a cooeperative store 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, 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."

FOOTNOTE:

[70] From "Three Men in a Boat," published by Henry Holt & Co.

JANE JONES[71]

BEN F. KING

Jane Jones keeps talkin' to me all the time,
An' says you must make it a rule
To study your lessons 'nd work hard 'nd learn,
An' never be absent from school.
Remember the story of Elihu Burrit,
An' how he clum up to the top,
Got all the knowledge 'at ever he had
Down in a blacksmithing shop!
Jane Jones she honestly said it wa