friends by displaying an irresistible tendency to vote the Democratic ticket, and made his mother-in-law mad by speaking with a strong brogue.  He gradually gave up butting, and never indulged in it in a serious manner but once, and that was on a certain Sunday, when, one of the remaining corpuscles of goat’s blood getting into his brain just as he was going into church, he butted the sexton halfway up the aisle, and only recovered himself sufficiently to apologize just as the enraged official was about to floor him with a hymn-book.

[Illustration:  SIMPSON’S CASE]

But the doctor did not succeed with private practice in Millburg, and so one day he made up his mind to try to get out of poverty by inventing a patent medicine.  After some reflection he concluded that the two most frequent and most unpopular forms of infirmity were baldness of head and torpidity of the liver, and he selected compounds recommended by the pharmacopoeia as the remedies which he would sell to the public.  One he called “Perkins’ Hair Vigor,” and the other “Perkins’ Liver Regulator.”  Procuring a large number of fancy bottles and gaudy labels, he bottled the medicines and advertised them extensively, with certificates of imaginary cures, which were written out for him by a friend whose liver was active and whose hair was abundant.

It is not at all unlikely that Perkins would have achieved success with his enterprise but for one unfortunate circumstance:  he was totally unfamiliar with the preparations, excepting in so far as the pharmacopoeia instructed him; and as ill-luck would have it, in putting them up he got the labels of the liver regulator on the hair vigor bottles, and the labels of the latter on the bottles containing the former.  Of course the results were appalling; and as Doctor Perkins had requested the afflicted to inform him of the benefits derived from applying the remedies, he had not sold more than a few hundred bottles before he began to hear from the purchasers.

One day, as he was coming out of his office, he observed a man sitting on the fire-plug with a shotgun in his hand and thunder upon his brow.  The man was bare-headed, and his scalp was covered with a shiny substance of some kind.  When he saw Perkins, he emptied one load of bird-shot into the inventor’s legs, and he was about to give him the contents of the other barrel, when Perkins hobbled into the office and shut the door.  The man pursued him and tried to break in the door with the butt of the gun.  He failed, and Perkins asked him what he meant by such murderous conduct.

“You come out here, and I’ll show you what I mean, you scoundrel!” said the man.  “You step out here for a minute, and I’ll blow the head off of you for selling me hair vigor that has gummed my head up so that I can’t wear a hat and can’t sleep without sticking to the pillow-case.  Turned my scalp all green and pink, too.  You put your head out of that door, and I’ll give you more vigor than you want, you idiot!  I expect that stuff’ll soak in and kill me.”