Now a consulting physician is different. He isn't exactly sure whether he is to be paid or not, and this 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 coördination 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 ," 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 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 .
 
"Now," he said, " 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, 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 or a cousin with ankles, the two doctors to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath tub for their . I ate an apple, and gazed first at my finger and then across the bay.
 
The doctors came out looking grave. More: they looked tombstones and Tennessee-papers-please-copy. They wrote out a diet list to which I was to be restricted. It had everything that I had ever heard of to eat on it, except . And I never eat a unless it overtakes me and bites me first.
 
"You must follow this diet strictly," said the doctors.
 
"I'd follow it a mile if I could get one-tenth of what's on it," I answered.
 
"Of next importance," they went on, "is outdoor air and exercise. And here is a that will be of great benefit to you."
 
Then all of us took something. They took their hats, and I took my departure.
 
I went to a druggist and showed him the prescription.
 
"It will be $2.87 for an ounce bottle," he said.
 
"Will you give me a piece of your wrapping cord?" said I.
 
I made a hole in the prescription, ran the cord through it, tied it around my neck, and tucked it inside. All of us have a little , and mine runs to a confidence in .
 
Of course there was nothing the matter with me, but I was very ill. I couldn't work, sleep, eat, or bowl. The only way I could get any sympathy was to go without shaving for four days. Even then somebody would say: "Old man, you look as as a pine knot. Been up for a in the Maine woods, eh?"
 
Then, suddenly, I remembered that I must have outdoor air and exercise. So I went down South to John's. John is an approximate relative by verdict of a preacher with a little book in his hands in a of while a hundred thousand people looked on. John has a country house seven miles from Pineville. It is at an altitude and on the Blue Mountains in a state too to be dragged into this . John is , which is more valuable and clearer than gold.
 
He met me at Pineville, and we took the car to his home. It is a big, neighbourless cottage on a hill surrounded by a hundred mountains. We got off at his little private station, where John's family and Amaryllis met and greeted us. Amaryllis looked at me a trifle anxiously.
 
A rabbit came bounding across the hill between us and the house. I threw down my suit-case and pursued it hotfoot. After I had run twenty yards and seen it disappear, I sat down on the grass and wept .
 
"I can't catch a rabbit any more," I . "I'm of no further use in the world. I may as well be dead."
 
"Oh, what is it—what is it, Brother John?" I heard Amaryllis say.
 
"Nerves a little unstrung," said John, in his calm way. "Don't worry. Get up, you rabbit-chaser, and come on to the house before the biscuits get cold." It was about , and the mountains came up nobly to Miss Murfree's descriptions of them.
 
Soon after dinner I announced that I believed I could sleep for a year or two, including legal holidays. So I was shown to a room as big and cool as a flower garden, where there was a bed as broad as a lawn. Soon the remainder of the household retired, and then there fell upon the land a silence.
 
I had not heard a silence before in years. It was absolute. I raised myself on my elbow and listened to it. Sleep! I thought that if I only could hear a star twinkle or a blade of grass sharpen itself I could compose myself to rest. I thought once that I heard a sound like the sail of a catboat flapping as it about in a breeze, but I that it was probably only a in the carpet. Still I listened.
 
Suddenly some belated little bird alighted upon the window-sill, and, in what he no doubt considered sleepy tones, the noise generally translated as "cheep!"
 
I leaped into the air.
 
"Hey! what's the matter down there?" called John from his room above mine.
 
"Oh, nothing," I answered, "except that I accidentally bumped my head against the ceiling."
 
The next morning I went out on the porch and looked at the mountains. There were forty-seven of them in sight. I , went into the big hall sitting room of the house, selected "Pancoast's Family Practice of Medicine" from a bookcase, and began to read. John came in, took the book away from me, and led me outside. He has a farm of three hundred acres furnished with the usual of barns, , peasantry, and harrows with three front teeth broken off. I had seen such things in my childhood, and my heart began to sink.
 
Then John of alfalfa, and I brightened at once. "Oh, yes," said I, "wasn't she in the chorus of—let's see—"
 
"Green, you know," said John, "and tender, and you it under after the first season."
 
"I know," said I, "and the grass grows over her."
 
"Right," said John. "You know something about farming, after all."
 
"I know something of some farmers," said I, ............