with men, women, and children of all colors lying about you. It was this
hideous mixture of black and white and yellow wretchedness which made
the place so peculiar. The blacks predominated, and had mostly
that swollen, reddish, dark skin, the sign in this race of habitual
drunkenness. Of course only the lowest whites were here--rag-pickers,
pawnbrokers, old-clothes men, thieves, and the like. All of this, as it
came before me, I viewed with mingled disgust and philosophy. I hated
filth, but I understood that society has to stand on somebody, and I was
only glad that I was not one of the undermost and worst-squeezed bricks.

I can hardly believe that I waited a month without having been called
upon by a single patient. At last a policeman on our beat brought me a
fancy man with a dog-bite. This patient recommended me to his brother,
the keeper of a small pawnbroking-shop, and by very slow degrees I began
to get stray patients who were too poor to indulge in up-town doctors.
I found the police very useful acquaintances; and, by a drink or a cigar
now and then, I got most of the cases of cut heads and the like at the
next station-house. These, however, were the aristocrats of my practice;
the bulk of my patients were soap-fat men, rag-pickers, oystermen,
hose-house bummers, and worse, with other and nameless trades, men and
women, white, black, or mulatto. How they got the levies, fips, and
quarters with which I was reluctantly paid, I do not know; that, indeed,
was none of my business. They expected to pay, and they came to me in
preference to the dispensary doctor, two or three squares away, who
seemed to me to spend most of his days in the lanes and alleys about us.
Of course he received no pay except experience, since the dispensaries
in the Quaker City, as a rule, do not give salaries to their doctors;
and the vilest of the poor prefer a "pay doctor" to one of these
disinterested gentlemen, who cannot be expected to give their best
brains for nothing, when at everybody's beck and call. I am told, indeed