This poor broken flower of misfortune holds down her head as the lady approaches, gives a look of melancholy expressive of shame and remorse.  “She’s sensitive for a nigger, and the only one that has said anything about being put among men,” Mr. Praiseworthy remarks, advancing a few steps, and then going from berth to berth, descanting on the prospects of his sick, explaining their various diseases, their improvements, and his doubts of the dying.  The lady watches all his movements, as if more intently interested in Mr. Praiseworthy’s strange character.  “And here’s one,” he says, “I fear I shall lose; and if I do, there’s fifty dollars gone, slap!” and he points to an emaciated yellow man, whose body is literally a crust of sores, and whose painful implorings for water and nourishment are deep and touching.

“Poor wretch!” Mr. Praiseworthy exclaims, “I wish I’d never bought him-it’s pained my feelings so; but I did it to save his life when he was most dead with the rheumatics, and was drawn up as crooked as branch cord-wood.  And then, after I had got the cinques out of him-after nearly getting him straight for a ‘prime fellow’ (good care did the thing), he took the water on the chest, and is grown out like that.”  He points coolly to the sufferer’s breast, which is fearfully distended with disease; saying that, “as if that wasn’t enough, he took the lepors, and it’s a squeak if they don’t end him.”  He pities the “crittur,” but has done all he can for him, which he would have done if he hadn’t expected a copper for selling him when cured.  “So you see, madam,” he reiterates, “it isn’t all profit.  I paid a good price for the poor skeleton, have had all ny trouble, and shall have no gain-except the recompense of feeling.  There was a time when I might have shared one hundred and fifty dollars by him, but I felt humane towards him; didn’t want him to slide until he was a No. 1.”  Thus the Elder sets forth his own goodness of heart.

“Pray, what do you pay a head for them, Mr. Praiseworthy?” enquires the lady, smoothing her hand over the feverish head of the poor victim, as the carnatic of her cheek changed to pallid languor.  Pursuing her object with calmness, she determined not to display her emotions until fully satisfied how far the Elder would go.

“That, madam, depends on cases; cripples are not worth much.  But, now and then, we get a legless fellow what’s sound in body, can get round sprightly, and such like; and, seeing how we can make him answer a sight of purposes, he’ll bring something,” he sedately replies, with muscles unmoved.  “Cases what doctors give up as ’done gone,’ we gets for ten and twenty dollars; cases not hanging under other diseases, we give from thirty to fifty-and so on!  Remember, however, you must deduct thirty per cent. for death.  At times, where you would make two or three hundred dollars by curing one, and saving his life, you lose three, sometimes half-a-dozen head.”  The Elder consoles his feelings with the fact that it is not all profit, looks highly gratified, puts a large cut of tobacco in his mouth, thanks God that the common school-bill didn’t pass in the legislature, and that his business is more humane than people generally admit.