Now a consulting physician is different.  He isn’t exactly sure whether he is to be paid or not, and this uncertainty insures you either the most careful or the most careless attention.  My doctor took me to see a consulting physician.  He made a poor guess and gave me careful attention.  I liked him immensely.  He put me through some coordination exercises.

“Have you a pain in the back of your head?” he asked.  I told him I had not.

“Shut your eyes,” he ordered, “put your feet close together, and jump backward as far as you can.”

I always was a good backward jumper with my eyes shut, so I obeyed.  My head struck the edge of the bathroom door, which had been left open and was only three feet away.  The doctor was very sorry.  He had overlooked the fact that the door was open.  He closed it.

“Now touch your nose with your right forefinger,” he said.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“On your face,” said he.

“I mean my right forefinger,” I explained.

“Oh, excuse me,” said he.  He reopened the bathroom door, and I took my finger out of the crack of it.  After I had performed the marvellous digito-nasal feat I said: 

“I do not wish to deceive you as to symptoms, Doctor; I really have something like a pain in the back of my head.”  He ignored the symptom and examined my heart carefully with a latest-popular-air-penny-in-the-slot ear-trumpet.  I felt like a ballad.

“Now,” he said, “gallop like a horse for about five minutes around the room.”

I gave the best imitation I could of a disqualified Percheron being led out of Madison Square Garden.  Then, without dropping in a penny, he listened to my chest again.

“No glanders in our family, Doc,” I said.

The consulting physician held up his forefinger within three inches of my nose.  “Look at my finger,” he commanded.

“Did you ever try Pears’—­” I began; but he went on with his test rapidly.

“Now look across the bay.  At my finger.  Across the bay.  At my finger.  At my finger.  Across the bay.  Across the bay.  At my finger.  Across the bay.”  This for about three minutes.

He explained that this was a test of the action of the brain.  It seemed easy to me.  I never once mistook his finger for the bay.  I’ll bet that if he had used the phrases:  “Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied, outward—­or rather laterally—­in the direction of the horizon, underlaid, so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet,” and “Now, returning—­or rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my upraised digit”—­I’ll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have passed the examination.

After asking me if I had ever had a grand uncle with curvature of the spine or a cousin with swelled ankles, the two doctors retired to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath tub for their consultation.  I ate an apple, and gazed first at my finger and then across the bay.