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