“Any mail for us this morning, Lydia, dear?” he asked.

Miss Lydia slid the letter beneath a fold of her dress.

“The Mobile Chronicle came,” she said promptly.  “It’s on the table in your study.”

XIV

LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE

So I went to a doctor.

“How long has it been since you took any alcohol into your system?” he asked.

Turning my head sidewise, I answered, “Oh, quite awhile.”

He was a young doctor, somewhere between twenty and forty.  He wore heliotrope socks, but he looked like Napoleon.  I liked him immensely.

“Now,” said he, “I am going to show you the effect of alcohol upon your circulation.”  I think it was “circulation” he said; though it may have been “advertising.”

He bared my left arm to the elbow, brought out a bottle of whiskey, and gave me a drink.  He began to look more like Napoleon.  I began to like him better.

Then he put a tight compress on my upper arm, stopped my pulse with his fingers, and squeezed a rubber bulb connected with an apparatus on a stand that looked like a thermometer.  The mercury jumped up and down without seeming to stop anywhere; but the doctor said it registered two hundred and thirty-seven or one hundred and sixty-five or some such number.

“Now,” said he, “you see what alcohol does to the blood-pressure.”

“It’s marvellous,” said I, “but do you think it a sufficient test?  Have one on me, and let’s try the other arm.”  But, no!

Then he grasped my hand.  I thought I was doomed and he was saying good-bye.  But all he wanted to do was to jab a needle into the end of a finger and compare the red drop with a lot of fifty-cent poker chips that he had fastened to a card.

“It’s the haemoglobin test,” he explained.  “The colour of your blood is wrong.”

“Well,” said I, “I know it should be blue; but this is a country of mix-ups.  Some of my ancestors were cavaliers; but they got thick with some people on Nantucket Island, so—­”

“I mean,” said the doctor, “that the shade of red is too light.”

“Oh,” said I, “it’s a case of matching instead of matches.”

The doctor then pounded me severely in the region of the chest.  When he did that I don’t know whether he reminded me most of Napoleon or Battling or Lord Nelson.  Then he looked grave and mentioned a string of grievances that the flesh is heir to—­mostly ending in “itis.”  I immediately paid him fifteen dollars on account.

“Is or are it or some or any of them necessarily fatal?” I asked.  I thought my connection with the matter justified my manifesting a certain amount of interest.

“All of them,” he answered cheerfully.  “But their progress may be arrested.  With care and proper continuous treatment you may live to be eighty-five or ninety.”

I began to think of the doctor’s bill.  “Eighty-five would be sufficient, I am sure,” was my comment.  I paid him ten dollars more on account.