“It didn’t seem so damp when I started out, Doctor.”

“And of course it was too much trouble to go back!  You wouldn’t feel that way if you couldn’t come out at all, perhaps!”

“I’ll put ’em on!  I’ll put ’em on!  Only, please don’t fuss, Doctor.  I’ll go back to the house and put ’em on.”

The doctor merely stared after him quizzically, like an old schoolmaster, as the rather stately colonel marched off to his home.

Another of his patients was an old Mr. Pegram, a large, kind, big-hearted man, who was very fond of the doctor, but who had an exceedingly irascible temper.  He was the victim of some obscure malady which medicine apparently failed at times to relieve.  This seemed to increase his irritability a great deal, so much so that the doctor had at last discovered that if he could get Mr. Pegram angry enough the malady would occasionally disappear.  This seemed at times as good a remedy as any, and in consequence he was occasionally inclined to try it.

Among other things, this old gentleman was the possessor of a handsome buffalo robe, which, according to a story that long went the rounds locally, he once promised to leave to the doctor when he died.  At the same time all reference to death both pained and irritated him greatly—­a fact which the doctor knew.  Finding the old gentleman in a most complaining and hopeless mood one night, not to be dealt with, indeed, in any reasoning way, the doctor returned to his home, and early the next day, without any other word, sent old Enoch, his negro servant, around to get, as he said, the buffalo robe—­a request which would indicate, of course that the doctor had concluded that old Mr. Pegram had died, or was about to—­a hopeless case.  When ushered into the latter’s presence, Enoch began innocently enough: 

“De doctah say dat now dat Mr. Peg’am hab subspired, he was to hab dat ba—­ba—­buffalo robe.”

“What!” shouted the old irascible, rising and clambering out of his bed.  “What’s that?  Buffalo robe!  By God!  You go back and tell old Doc Gridley that I ain’t dead yet by a damned sight!  No, sir!” and forthwith he dressed himself and was out and around the same day.

Persons who met the doctor, as I heard years later from his daughter and from others who had known him, were frequently asking him, just in a social way, what to do for certain ailments, and he would as often reply in a humorous and half-vagrom manner that if he were in their place he would do or take so-and-so, not meaning really that they should do so but merely to get rid of them, and indicating of course any one of a hundred harmless things—­never one that could really have proved injurious to any one.  Once, according to his daughter, as he was driving into town from somewhere, he met a man on a lumber wagon whom he scarcely knew but who knew him well enough, who stopped and showed him a sore on the upper tip of his ear, asking him what he would do for it.