All of them were Southern gentlemen, with more money than I had.Many of them carried great sticks, usually sword-canes, and some bowie-knives or pistols; also, they delighted in swallow-tailed coats, long hair, broad-brimmed felt hats, and very tight boots.I often think of these gentlemen with affectionate interest, and wonder how many are lying under the wheat-fields of Virginia.One could see them any day sauntering along with their arms over their companions' shoulders, splendidly indifferent to the ways of the people about them.They hated the ``Nawth'' and cursed the Yankees, and honestly believed that the leanest of them was a match for any half a dozen of the bulkiest of Northerners.I must also do them the justice to say that they were quite as ready to fight as to brag, which, by the way, is no meager statement.With these gentry--for whom I retain a respect which filled me with regret at the recent course of events--I spent a good deal of my large leisure.The more studious of both sections called us a hard crowd.What we did, or how we did it, little concerns me here, except that, owing to my esteem for chivalric blood and breeding, I was led into many practices and excesses which cost my guardian and myself a good deal of money.At the close of my career as a student I found myself aged twenty-one years, and the owner of some seven hundred dollars--the rest of my small estate having disappeared variously within the last two years.After my friends had gone to their homes in the South I began to look about me for an office, and finally settled upon very good rooms in one of the down-town localities of the Quaker City.I am not specific as to the number and street, for reasons which may hereafter appear.I liked the situation on various accounts.It had been occupied by a doctor; the terms were reasonable; and it lay on the skirts of a good neighborhood, while below it lived a motley population, among which I expected to get my first patients and such fees as were to be had.Into this new home I moved my medical text-books, a few bones, and myself.
Also, I displayed in the window a fresh sign, upon which was distinctly to be read:
DR.E.SANDERAFT.
Office hours, 8 to 9 A.M., 7 to 9 P.M.
I felt now that I had done my fair share toward attaining a virtuous subsistence, and so I waited tranquilly, and without undue enthusiasm, to see the rest of the world do its part in the matter.Meanwhile I read up on all sorts of imaginable cases, stayed at home all through my office hours, and at intervals explored the strange section of the town which lay to the south of my office.Ido not suppose there is anything like it else where.It was then filled with grog-shops, brothels, slop-shops, and low lodging-houses.
You could dine for a penny on soup made from the refuse meats of the rich, gathered at back gates by a horde of half-naked children, who all told varieties of one woeful tale.Here, too, you could be drunk for five cents, and be lodged for three, with men, women, and children of all colors lying about you.It was this hideous mixture of black and white and yellow wretchedness which made the place so peculiar.The blacks predominated, and had mostly that swollen, reddish, dark skin, the sign in this race of habitual drunkenness.Of course only the lowest whites were here--rag-pickers, pawnbrokers, old-clothes men, thieves, and the like.All of this, as it came before me, Iviewed with mingled disgust and philosophy.
I hated filth, but I understood that society has to stand on somebody, and I was only glad that I was not one of the undermost and worst-squeezed bricks.
I can hardly believe that I waited a month without having been called upon by a single patient.At last a policeman on our beat brought me a fancy man with a dog-bite.
This patient recommended me to his brother, the keeper of a small pawnbroking-shop, and by very slow degrees I began to get stray patients who were too poor to indulge in up-town doctors.I found the police very useful acquaintances; and, by a drink or a cigar now and then, I got most of the cases of cut heads and the like at the next station-house.
These, however, were the aristocrats of my practice; the bulk of my patients were soap-fat men, rag-pickers, oystermen, hose-house bummers, and worse, with other and nameless trades, men and women, white, black, or mulatto.How they got the levies, fips, and quarters with which I was reluctantly paid, I do not know; that, indeed, was none of my business.They expected to pay, and they came to me in preference to the dispensary doctor, two or three squares away, who seemed to me to spend most of his days in the lanes and alleys about us.Of course he received no pay except experience, since the dispensaries in the Quaker City, as a rule, do not give salaries to their doctors;and the vilest of the poor prefer a ``pay doctor'' to one of these disinterested gentlemen, who cannot be expected to give their best brains for nothing, when at everybody's beck and call.I am told, indeed I know, that most young doctors do a large amount of poor practice, as it is called; but, for my own part, I think it better for both parties when the doctor insists upon some compensation being made to him.This has been usually my own custom, and I have not found reason to regret it.
Notwithstanding my strict attention to my own interests, I have been rather sorely dealt with by fate upon several occasions, where, so far as I could see, I was vigilantly doing everything in my power to keep myself out of trouble or danger.I may as well relate one of them, merely to illustrate of how little value a man's intellect may be when fate and the prejudices of the mass of men are against him.
One evening, late, I myself answered a ring at the bell, and found a small black boy on the steps, a shoeless, hatless little wretch, curled darkness for hair, and teeth like new tombstones.It was pretty cold, and he was relieving his feet by standing first on one and then on the other.He did not wait for me to speak.