Doctor Parcival appeared immediately after Will Henderson had disappeared.  One might have supposed that the doctor had been watching from his office window and had seen the editor going along the alleyway.  Coming in at the front door and finding himself a chair, he lighted one of the stogies and crossing his legs began to talk.  He seemed intent upon convincing the boy of the advisability of adopting a line of conduct that he was himself unable to define.

“If you have your eyes open you will see that although I call myself a doctor I have mighty few patients,” he began.  “There is a reason for that.  It is not an accident and it is not because I do not know as much of medicine as anyone here.  I do not want patients.  The reason, you see, does not appear on the surface.  It lies in fact in my character, which has, if you think about it, many strange turns.  Why I want to talk to you of the matter I don’t know.  I might keep still and get more credit in your eyes.  I have a desire to make you admire me, that’s a fact.  I don’t know why.  That’s why I talk.  It’s very amusing, eh?”

Sometimes the doctor launched into long tales concerning himself.  To the boy the tales were very real and full of meaning.  He began to admire the fat unclean-looking man and, in the afternoon when Will Henderson had gone, looked forward with keen interest to the doctor’s coming.

Doctor Parcival had been in Winesburg about five years.  He came from Chicago and when he arrived was drunk and got into a fight with Albert Longworth, the baggageman.  The fight concerned a trunk and ended by the doctor’s being escorted to the village lockup.  When he was released he rented a room above a shoe-repairing shop at the lower end of Main Street and put out the sign that announced himself as a doctor.  Although he had but few patients and these of the poorer sort who were unable to pay, he seemed to have plenty of money for his needs.  He slept in the office that was unspeakably dirty and dined at Biff Carter’s lunch room in a small frame building opposite the railroad station.  In the summer the lunch room was filled with flies and Biff Carter’s white apron was more dirty than his floor.  Doctor Parcival did not mind.  Into the lunch room he stalked and deposited twenty cents upon the counter.  “Feed me what you wish for that,” he said laughing.  “Use up food that you wouldn’t otherwise sell.  It makes no difference to me.  I am a man of distinction, you see.  Why should I concern myself with what I eat.”

The tales that Doctor Parcival told George Willard began nowhere and ended nowhere.  Sometimes the boy thought they must all be inventions, a pack of lies.  And then again he was convinced that they contained the very essence of truth.