"Ugh!" shuddered Mrs. Pedagog. "You almost make me afraid to let the Doctor stay in this house a day longer." "Don't be afraid, Madame," said the Doctor amiably. "After all, I'm a doctor, you know, and not a plumber." "I'll guarantee his absolute harmlessness, Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "We're perfectly safe here. It is no temptation to a doctor to sow the germs of disorder among people like ourselves who have reduced getting free medical advice to a system." "Well," said Mr. Brief, the lawyer, "your plan is all right for the doctors, but why the Dickens don't somebody suggest something for us lawyers once in awhile? There were seventy thousand new lawyers turned out yesterday, and you haven't even peeped." "No," said the Idiot, "it isn't necessary. You lawyers are well provided for. With one National Congress, and forty-eight separate State Legislatures working twenty-four hours a day, turning out fifty-seven new varieties of law every fifteen minutes, all so phrased that no human mind can translate them into simple English, there's enough trouble constantly on hand to keep twenty million lawyers busy for thirty million years, telling us not what we can't do, but what few things there are left under the canopy that a man of religious inclinations can do without danger of arrest!" VII THE U. S. TELEPHONIC AID SOCIETY "Well, Mr. Idiot," said the Doctor, as the Idiot with sundry comments on the top-loftical condition of the thermometer fanned his fevered brow with a tablespoon, "I suppose in view of the hot weather you will be taking a vacation very shortly." "Not only very shortly, but excessively shortly," returned the Idiot. "Its shortliness will be of so brief a nature that nobody'll notice any vacant chairs around where I am accustomed to sit. But let me tell you, Dr. Squills, it is too hot for sarcasm, so withhold your barbs as far as I am concerned, and believe me always very truly yours, Nicholas J. Doodlepate." "Sarcasm?" said the Doctor in a surprised tone. "Why, my dear fellow, I wasn't sarcastic, was I? I am sure I didn't mean to be." "To the listener's ear it seemed so," said the Idiot. "There seemed to me to be traces of the alkali of irony mixed in with the tincture of derision in that question of yours. When you ask a Wall Street man who declines to carry speculation accounts these days if he isn't going to take a vacation shortly, it is like asking a resident of the Desert of Sahara why he doesn't sprinkle a little sand around his place. "Life on Wall Street for my kind, my good sir, of late has been just one darned vacation after another. The only business I have done in three months was to lend one of our customers a nickel, taking a subway ticket and a baseball rain check as collateral security." The Idiot shook his head ruefully and heaved a heart-rending sigh. "What we cautious Wall Street fellows need," said he, "is not a VA-cation, but a VO-cation."