Dr. Benjamin set me down before his one window and began looking at me with such a superhuman air of sagacity, that I felt like one of those open-breasted clocks which make no secret of their inside arrangements, and almost thought he could see through me as one sees through a shrimp or a jelly-fish.  First he looked at the place inculpated, which had a sort of greenish-brown color, with his naked eyes, with much corrugation of forehead and fearful concentration of attention; then through a pocket-glass which he carried.  Then he drew back a space, for a perspective view.  Then he made me put out my tongue and laid a slip of blue paper on it, which turned red and scared me a little.  Next he took my wrist; but instead of counting my pulse in the old-fashioned way, he fastened a machine to it that marked all the beats on a sheet of paper,—­for all the world like a scale of the heights of mountains, say from Mount Tom up to Chimborazo and then down again, and up again, and so on.  In the mean time he asked me all sorts of questions about myself and all my relatives, whether we had been subject to this and that malady, until I felt as if we must some of us have had more or less of them, and could not feel quite sure whether Elephantiasis and Beriberi and Progressive Locomotor Ataxy did not run in the family.

After all this overhauling of myself and my history, he paused and looked puzzled.  Something was suggested about what he called an “exploratory puncture.”  This I at once declined, with thanks.  Suddenly a thought struck him.  He looked still more closely at the discoloration I have spoken of.

—­Looks like—­I declare it reminds me of—­very rare! very curious!  It would be strange if my first case—­of this kind—­should be one of our boarders!

What kind of a case do you call it?—­I said, with a sort of feeling that he could inflict a severe or a light malady on me, as if he were a judge passing sentence.

—­The color reminds me,—­said Dr. B. Franklin,—­of what I have seen in a case of Addison’s Disease, Morbus Addisonii.

—­But my habits are quite regular,—­I said; for I remembered that the distinguished essayist was too fond of his brandy and water, and I confess that the thought was not pleasant to me of following Dr. Johnson’s advice, with the slight variation of giving my days and my nights to trying on the favorite maladies of Addison.

—­Temperance people are subject to it!—­exclaimed Dr. Benjamin, almost exultingly, I thought.

—­But I had the impression that the author of the Spectator was afflicted with a dropsy, or some such inflated malady, to which persons of sedentary and bibacious habits are liable. [A literary swell,—­I thought to myself, but I did not say it.  I felt too serious.]

—­The author of the Spectator!—­cried out Dr. Benjamin,—­I mean the celebrated Dr. Addison, inventor, I would say discoverer, of the wonderful new disease called after him.