Elbow-Room Part 28

Reports were floating about the city yesterday to the effect that the Wandering Jew had been seen over in New Jersey. A reporter was sent over at once to hunt him up, and to interview him if he should be found. After a somewhat protracted search the reporter discovered a promising-looking person sitting on the top rail of a fence just outside of Camden engaged in eating some crackers and cheese. The reporter approached him and addressed him at a venture:

"Beautiful day, Cantaphilus!"

This familiarity seemed necessary; because if the Wandering Jew has any family name, the fact has not been revealed to the public.

"Bless my soul, young man, how on earth did you know me?" exclaimed the Jew.

"Oh, I don't know; something about your appearance told me who it was.

I'm mighty glad to see you, any way. When did you arrive?"

"I came on here yesterday. Been down in Terra del Fuego, where I heard about the Centennial, and I thought I'd run up and have a look at it.

Be a good thing, I reckon. Time flies, though, don't it? Seems to me only yesterday that a man over here in Siberia told me that you people were fighting your Revolutionary war."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WANDERING JEW]

He sat upon the fence as he talked; his feet, cased in gum shoes, rested on the third rail from the bottom; his umbrella was under his arm; his face was deeply wrinkled, and his long white beard bobbed up and down as he ate his lunch voraciously, diving into his carpet-bag every now and then for more. The reporter remarked that he feared that such a liberal diet of cheese would disagree with the eater, but the old man said,

"Why, my goodness, sonny, I've been hunting all over the earth for seventeen centuries for something to disagree with me. That's what I yearn for. If I could only get dyspepsia once, I might hope to wear myself out. But it's no use. I could lunch on a pound of nails and feel as comfortable as a baby after a bottle of milk. That's one of my peculiarities. You know nothing ever hurts me. Why, I've been thrown out of volcanoes--lemme see: well, dozens of times--and never been singed a bit. 'Most always, in real cold weather, I step over to Italy and roost around inside of Vesuvius; and then, maybe, there's an eruption, and I'm heaved out a couple of hundred miles or so, but always safe and sound. What I don't know about volcanic eruptions, my child, isn't worth knowing. I went sailing around through the air when Pompeii was destroyed. Yes, sir, I was there; saw the whole thing.

Why, I could tell you the most wonderful stories. You wouldn't believe."

"How do you travel generally?"

"Oh, different ways. I have gone around some in sleeping-cars, and had my baggage checked through; but generally I prefer to walk. I'm never in a hurry, and I like to take my own route. I'm a mighty good walker.

I did think of getting up some kind of a pedestrian match with some of your champion walkers, but it's no use; it'd only create an excitement."

"How do people treat you usually?"

"Well, I can't complain. Snap me up for a tramp sometimes, or make disagreeable remarks about me. But generally I get along well enough.

The undertakers are hardest on me. They say I exercise a depressing influence on their business by setting a bad example to other people; and one of 'em, over in Constantinople, he said a man who'd defrauded about fifty-four generations of undertakers ought to be ashamed to show his face in civilized society. But bless you, sonny, I don't mind them. Business, you know, is business. It's perfectly natural for them to feel that way about it; now, isn't it?"

"Will you have a cigar, after eating?"

"No; none for me. Raleigh wanted me to learn to smoke when he was in Virginia, but I didn't care for it. You remember him, of course?

Oh no; I forgot how young you are. Pleasant man, but a little too chimerical. I liked Columbus better. Nero was a man who'd've suited you newspaper people. 'Most always a murder every day. And then that fire in Rome when he fiddled; made a splendid report for the papers, wouldn't it? Poor sort of a man, though. The only time I ever saw him was when he was drowning his mother. Dropped the old lady over and let her drift off as if he didn't care a cent."

"Talking of newspapers, how would you like to make an engagement as the traveling correspondent of the _Patriot_?"

"Well, I dunno. I wouldn't mind sending you a letter now and then, but I don't care to make any regular engagement. You see I haven't written a great deal for about eighteen hundred years, and a man kind of gets out of practice in that time. I write such an awful poor hand, too.

No; I guess I won't contribute regularly. I have thought sometimes maybe I might do a little work as a book-agent, so's to pick up a few stray dollars. But I never had a fair chance offered to me, and I didn't care enough about it to hunt it up; and so nothing ever came of it. I could make a good book fairly hum around this globe, though, don't you think?"

"Were you ever married? Did you ever have a wife?"

"See here, my son, I never did you any harm, and what's the use of your bringing up such disagreeable reminiscences? The old lady died in Egypt in 73. They made her up into a mummy, and I reckon they put a pyramid on her to hold her down. That's enough; that satisfies me."

"Is your memory generally good?"

"Well, about fair; that's all. I know I used to get Petrarch mixed up in my mind with St. Peter, and I've several times alluded to Plutarch as the G.o.d of the infernal regions. I'm often hazy about people. The queerest thing! You know that once, in conversation with Benjamin Franklin, I confounded Mark Antony with Saint Anthony, and actually alluded to the saint's oration over the dead body of Caesar. Positive fact. I'll tell you how I often keep the run of things: I say of a certain event, 'That happened during the century that I was bilious,'

or, 'It occurred in the century when I had rheumatism.' That's the way I fix the time. I did commence to keep a diary back in 134, but I ran up a stack of ma.n.u.script three or four hundred feet high, and then I gave it up. Couldn't lug it round with me, you know."

"I suppose you have known a great many celebrated people?"

"Plenty of 'em--plenty of 'em, sir. By the way, did anybody ever tell you that you looked like Mohammed? Well, sir, you do. Astonishing likeness! Now, _there_ was an old scalawag for you. A perfect fraud! I lent that man a pair of boots in 598, and he never returned them; said I'd get my reward hereafter. I've regretted those boots for nearly thirteen hundred years."

"Did it ever occur to you to lecture?"

"Oh yes; I've turned it over in my mind. But I guess I won't. You see, my son, I'm so crammed full of information that if I began a discourse I could hardly stop under a couple of years; and that's too long for a lecture, you know. Then they might _encore_ it; and so I hardly think I'd better go in. No, I'll just trudge along in the old fashion."

"Have you any views about the questions of the day? Are you in favor of soft money or hard?"

"Young man, the advice to you of a man who has studied the world for nearly two thousand years is to take any kind you can get. That's solid wisdom."

Then, as the old man babbled on, he descended from the fence, shouldered his umbrella, and together the two started for the ferry.

He said he wanted to buy a new suit of clothes. That he had on he had bought in 1807 in Germany, and it was beginning to get threadbare. So the reporter led him over the river, put him in a horse-car, asked him to send his address to the office, and the aged pilgrim nudged up into a corner seat, put his valise on the floor and sailed serenely out of sight amid the reverberation of the oaths hurled by the driver at an Irish drayman who occupied the track in front of the car.

CHAPTER XXVI.

_THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF DR. PERKINS_.

It might be hardly fair to say that Doctor Perkins, a former resident of the village, was a quack; he may be described in milder phrase as an irregular pract.i.tioner. He belonged to none of the accepted schools, but treated his patients in accordance with certain theories of his own. The doctor had a habit of relating remarkable stories of his own achievements, and the most wonderful of these was his account of an attempt that he once made to cure a man named Simpson of consumption by the process of transfusion of blood. The doctor, according to his own story, determined to inject healthy blood into Simpson's veins.

As no human being was willing to shed his blood for Simpson, the doctor bled Simpson's goat; and opening a vein in Simpson's arm, he injected about two quarts of the blood into the patient's system.

Simpson immediately began to revive, but, singular to relate, no sooner had his strength returned than he jumped out of bed; and twitching his head about after the fashion of a goat, he made a savage attempt to b.u.t.t the doctor. That medical gentleman, after having Simpson's head plunged against his stomach three or four times, took refuge in the closet; whereupon Simpson banged his head against the panel of the door a couple of times, and would probably have broken it to splinters had not his mother-in-law entered at that moment and diverted his attention. One well-directed blow from Simpson floored her, and then, while she screamed for help, Simpson frolicked around over the floor, making a.s.siduous efforts to nibble the green flowers in the ingrain carpet. When they called the hired man in and tied him down on the bed, an effort was made to interview him, but the only answer he could give to such questions as how he felt and when he wanted his medicine was a "ba-a" precisely like that of a goat, and then he would strain himself in an effort to b.u.t.t a hole in the headboard. The condition of the patient was so alarming, and Mrs.

Simpson was so indignant, that Dr. Perkins determined to undo the evil if possible. So he first bled Simpson freely, and then, by heavily bribing Simpson's Irishman, he procured fresh blood from him, and injected Simpson the second time. Simpson recovered, but he shocked his old Republican friends by displaying an irresistible tendency to vote the Democratic ticket, and made his mother-in-law mad by speaking with a strong brogue. He gradually gave up b.u.t.ting, and never indulged in it in a serious manner but once, and that was on a certain Sunday, when, one of the remaining corpuscles of goat's blood getting into his brain just as he was going into church, he b.u.t.ted the s.e.xton halfway up the aisle, and only recovered himself sufficiently to apologize just as the enraged official was about to floor him with a hymn-book.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIMPSON'S CASE]

But the doctor did not succeed with private practice in Millburg, and so one day he made up his mind to try to get out of poverty by inventing a patent medicine. After some reflection he concluded that the two most frequent and most unpopular forms of infirmity were baldness of head and torpidity of the liver, and he selected compounds recommended by the pharmacopoeia as the remedies which he would sell to the public. One he called "Perkins' Hair Vigor," and the other "Perkins' Liver Regulator." Procuring a large number of fancy bottles and gaudy labels, he bottled the medicines and advertised them extensively, with certificates of imaginary cures, which were written out for him by a friend whose liver was active and whose hair was abundant.

It is not at all unlikely that Perkins would have achieved success with his enterprise but for one unfortunate circ.u.mstance: he was totally unfamiliar with the preparations, excepting in so far as the pharmacopoeia instructed him; and as ill-luck would have it, in putting them up he got the labels of the liver regulator on the hair vigor bottles, and the labels of the latter on the bottles containing the former. Of course the results were appalling; and as Doctor Perkins had requested the afflicted to inform him of the benefits derived from applying the remedies, he had not sold more than a few hundred bottles before he began to hear from the purchasers.

One day, as he was coming out of his office, he observed a man sitting on the fire-plug with a shotgun in his hand and thunder upon his brow. The man was bare-headed, and his scalp was covered with a shiny substance of some kind. When he saw Perkins, he emptied one load of bird-shot into the inventor's legs, and he was about to give him the contents of the other barrel, when Perkins hobbled into the office and shut the door. The man pursued him and tried to break in the door with the b.u.t.t of the gun. He failed, and Perkins asked him what he meant by such murderous conduct.

"You come out here, and I'll show you what I mean, you scoundrel!"

said the man. "You step out here for a minute, and I'll blow the head off of you for selling me hair vigor that has gummed my head up so that I can't wear a hat and can't sleep without sticking to the pillow-case. Turned my scalp all green and pink, too. You put your head out of that door, and I'll give you more vigor than you want, you idiot! I expect that stuff'll soak in and kill me."

Then the man took his seat again on the fire-plug, and after reloading the barrel of his gun put on a fresh cap and waited. Perkins remained inside and sent a boy out the back way for the mail. The first letter he opened was from a woman, who wrote:

"My husband took one dose of your liver regulator and immediately went into spasms. He has had fits every hour for four days. As soon as he dies I am coming on to kill the fiend who poisoned him."

A clergyman in Delaware wrote to ask what were the ingredients of the liver regulator. He feared something was wrong, because his aunt had taken the medicine only twice, when she began to roll over on the floor and howl in the most alarming manner, and she had been in a comatose condition for fifteen hours.

A man named Johnson dropped a line to say that after applying the hair vigor to his scalp he had leaned his head against the back of a chair, and it had now been in that position two days. He feared he would never be released unless he cut up the chair and wore the piece permanently on his head. He was coming to see Perkins in reference to the matter when he got loose, and he was going to bring his dog with him.

A Mr. Wilson said that his boy had put some of the vigor on his face in order to induce the growth of a moustache, and that at the present moment the boy's upper lip was glued fast to the tip of his nose and his countenance looked as if it had been coated with green varnish.