Humbug is not necessarily synonymous with ignorance. So far from it, that
doubtless a very perfect and successful man in the art of humbugging must
be educated to his business.
The following true statement is a case in point: A physician of New York,
now in excellent standing, who "rolls in riches," and whose own carriage
is drawn by a span of horses that Bonner once might have envied, was but a
few years ago as poor as a church mouse, and as unknown as Scripture. He
had graduated with honors in Transylvania University, opened an office in
a country town, where his knowledge and talents were unappreciated, and
which place he abandoned after a twelve months' patient waiting for a
practice which did not come. He had become poorer every month, and but
for the kind assistance of early friends, must have perished of want.
"Either it is distressingly healthy here, or the good people are afraid to
trust their lives and healths in the hands of an inexperienced physician,"
he remarked to a friend to whom he applied for means for a new start
elsewhere.
"And where will you try your luck next?" inquired his friend.
"In New York city."
"In New York city?"
"Yes, and I shall there succeed," he exclaimed, with great determination.
"Well, I hope in my heart of hearts you will," was his friend's reply, as
he kindly loaned him the required sum of money.
Had his friend asked the advice of a third party before making the loan,
doubtless the answer would have been something like the following, though
it was respecting another case:--
"Dr. J. wants me to loan him some money for thirty days; do you suppose he
will refund it?"
"What! lend him money?" was the reply. "He return it? No, sir; if you lend
that man an emetic he would never _return_ it."
On his borrowed funds,--neither principal nor interest of which his kind
friend ever expected him to be able to return,--the doctor entered the
great metropolis. He hired a house in a respectable locality, and hung out
his sign. During his long quiet days in the country village he had read a
great deal, and was "up to the tricks" of his predecessors. He had
particularly posted himself on the ways and means resorted to by some of
those physicians, of whom we have already made brief mention, for getting
into practice.
[Illustration: COMMENCING A PRACTICE IN NEW YORK.]
"What avails it that I know as much as other physicians who have entered
upon a practice? What does my diploma amount to if I have no patients?"
he asked himself over and again. Practice was now his want, and this is
the way he obtained it. Having read of a celebrated physician, who kept
his few patients a long time in waiting, under pretence that he was
preoccupied by the many who fortunately had preceded, our young physician
adopted that great man's tactics. For want of patients to keep in waiting,
he hired some decently dressed lackeys to apply regularly at his front
door, at specified times, and wait till the colored servant admitted them,
one at a time. Each was passed out after a half hour's supposed
consultation, and the next admitted. The neighbors and others passing,
seeing patients continually in waiting, some with a hand, a foot, face, or
other parts bound up, were led to read his sign, and soon a _bona fide_
patient applied, who, in turn, was kept waiting a long time,
notwithstanding the young doctor's anxiety to finger a real medical fee
from his first New York patient. Others followed, the lackeys were
dismissed, and the physician's practice was established. His merit kept
what his shrewdness had obtained.
Cannot the reader avouch for the reputed extensive rides of some country
doctor, who, without a known patient, harnessed his bare-ribbed old horse
to his crazy gig, and drove furiously about the country, returning by a
roundabout way, without having made a single professional visit, thereby
humbugging the honest country people into a belief that he had innumerable
patients in his route?
To quite another class of humbugs belongs the subject of the following
sketch. I have had the pleasure of meeting him but twice--may I never meet
him again. The first interview was at the board of a country hotel.
[Illustration: GRACE BEFORE MEAT.]
I had arrived late at evening by rail, and ordered a light supper. When
the tea-bell had summoned me, I found a large, phlegmatic individual
seated opposite at the table, who possibly had arrived by the same
conveyance as myself. His person was quite repulsive. He was probably
fifty years of age, his eyes watery and restless, his thin stock of
hair--indicating a corresponding poverty of brain--black, streaked by
gray, was stuck back professionally (!) over a low bump of veneration, and
high organs of firmness and self-esteem, which, with a Roman nose, large,
protruding under jaw, and wide, open mouth, gave him a striking
appearance, at least. But what was most observable was his thin, uneven,
scraggy whiskers, uncombed, and besmeared by tobacco juice and bits of the
weed, drooling down over their uncertain length, over waistcoat, and so
out of sight below the table. His coat sleeves had evidently been
substituted for a handkerchief when too great a surplus of tobacco juice
obstructed his face. He bent his great, watery eyes over towards me, and
opened the ball by suggesting that I ask a blessing over the food so
bountifully and temptingly laid before us. Having too much compassion on
the present exhausted state of my stomach to disregard its immediate
demands, and too little confidence in the veneration of my _vis-a-vis_ to
return the request, I went to eating, while he closed one eye, keeping the
other on a plate of hot steak just placed before him by the table girl. I
have since been strongly reminded of him by the character "Bishopriggs,"
in Wilkie Collins's book, "_Man and Wife_." I think, however, for
hypocrisy, the present subject exceeded Bishopriggs. Having wagged his
enormous jaw a few times, by way of grace, he began eating and conversing
alternately.
"I take it, friend, you're a railroad conductor, coming in so late," he
suggested, between mouthfuls.
"No," was my brief reply.
"Perhaps, cap'n, you're a drummer. Sell dry or wet goods?"
"No."
"A newspaper man?"