"I take it, friend, you're a railroad conductor, coming in so late," he suggested, between mouthfuls.
"Perhaps, cap'n, you're a drummer. Sell dry or wet goods?"
"Not a minister," he asserted. "Perhaps a doctor," he perseveringly continued.
"O! ah! indeed! I am rejoiced to learn it. Give me your hand, sir," he exclaimed, rising and reaching his enormous palm across the table. "I am rejoiced, as I said before, to meet a brother."
"A _brother_!" I repeated, with unfeigned surprise and disgust.
"Yes, a brother! I, too, am a doctor. I have the honor," etc., for the next ten minutes, while I hastened to finish my supper.
His last interrogation was what a college boy would call a "stunner."
"_Do you think, sir, that the Fillopian ducks are the same in a male as they are in a female?_"
[Dr. S., a quack living in Winsted, Conn., once said to an educated physician, that he sometimes found difficulty in introducing a female catheter on account of the "prostrate" (meaning _prostate_) gland,--which exists only in the male!]
I saw him once after the above interesting interview. He entered the drug house of Rust, Bird, & Brother, Boston, just as I was about to go out. I could not refrain from turning my attention towards him, as I recognized his stentorian voice.
"Have you got any _Bonyset arbs_?" was all I waited to hear. I subsequently learned that he was known in Vermont and part of New York State by the _sobriquet_ of "Dr. Pusbelly."
The following story respecting "Dr. Pusbelly," related in my hearing by a stage-driver, is in perfect keeping with the character of the man, as he impressed me in my first interview at the country hotel.
One sunny day in autumn I had occasion to take a long journey "away down in Maine," when and where there was no railroad. I was seated on the outside of a four-horse stage-coach, with three or four other passengers, one of whom was a lady, who preferred riding in that elevated station to being cramped up inside the coach with eight persons, besides sundry babies, a poodle dog, and a parrot.
"Sam," our driver, was a sociable fellow, full of pleasant stories,--and Medford rum, though he was considered a perfectly safe Jehu. The greatest drawback to his otherwise agreeable yarns was his habit of swearing. Notwithstanding the presence of the lady, he would occasionally round his periods and emphasize his sentences with an expletive which had better have been omitted.