Meantime the days went along and the weeks, and the money in Harry’s pocket got lower and lower.  He was just as liberal with what he had as before, indeed it was his nature to be free with his money or with that of others, and he could lend or spend a dollar with an air that made it seem like ten.  At length, at the end of one week, when his hotel bill was presented, Harry found not a cent in his pocket to meet it.  He carelessly remarked to the landlord that he was not that day in funds, but he would draw on New York, and he sat down and wrote to the contractors in that city a glowing letter about the prospects of the road, and asked them to advance a hundred or two, until he got at work.  No reply came.  He wrote again, in an unoffended business like tone, suggesting that he had better draw at three days.  A short answer came to this, simply saying that money was very tight in Wall street just then, and that he had better join the engineer corps as soon as he could.

But the bill had to be paid, and Harry took it to Philip, and asked him if he thought he hadn’t better draw on his uncle.  Philip had not much faith in Harry’s power of “drawing,” and told him that he would pay the bill himself.  Whereupon Harry dismissed the matter then and thereafter from his thoughts, and, like a light-hearted good fellow as he was, gave himself no more trouble about his board-bills.  Philip paid them, swollen as they were with a monstrous list of extras; but he seriously counted the diminishing bulk of his own hoard, which was all the money he had in the world.  Had he not tacitly agreed to share with Harry to the last in this adventure, and would not the generous fellow divide; with him if he, Philip, were in want and Harry had anything?

The fever at length got tired of tormenting the stout young engineer, who lay sick at the hotel, and left him, very thin, a little sallow but an “acclimated” man.  Everybody said he was “acclimated” now, and said it cheerfully.  What it is to be acclimated to western fevers no two persons exactly agree.

Some say it is a sort of vaccination that renders death by some malignant type of fever less probable.  Some regard it as a sort of initiation, like that into the Odd Fellows, which renders one liable to his regular dues thereafter.  Others consider it merely the acquisition of a habit of taking every morning before breakfast a dose of bitters, composed of whiskey and assafoetida, out of the acclimation jug.

Jeff Thompson afterwards told Philip that he once asked Senator Atchison, then acting Vice-President:  of the United States, about the possibility of acclimation; he thought the opinion of the second officer of our great government would be, valuable on this point.  They were sitting together on a bench before a country tavern, in the free converse permitted by our democratic habits.

“I suppose, Senator, that you have become acclimated to this country?”