“Maybe you heard that I had a nervous breakdown last spring. Kind of a mixture of things.” “Yes; I know the mixture. Three of gin to one of Italian.” “You know too much for a minister,” growled the other. “Besides, it was only part that. I just sort of got sick of doing nothing and being nothing, and the sickness struck in, I expect. Well, one morning, after a night of bridge, I came out into the breakfast-room nine hundred plus to the good, and about ready to invest the whole in any kind of painless dope that would save me from being bored with this life any more. There sat Doc Gerritt, pink and smooth like a cherry-stone clam. I stuck out my hand, and it was shaking. I dare say my voice was shaking, too, for Gerry looked up pretty sharp, when I said, 'Doc, can you do anything for me?' 'No,' says he. 'Is it as bad as that?' I asked. 'It's worse,' says he. 'I'm a busy man with no time to waste on sure losses. Flat down, Cyrus, you aren't worth it.' 'This is all I've got of me,' I said. 'I'm worth it to myself.' 'Then do it for yourself,' he snapped. 'You're the only one that can.' 'Will you tell me how?' 'I will,' says he. 'But you won't do it. You aren't man enough.' 'Gerry,' I said, 'you may be a good doctor, but you're a damn liar.' 'Am I?' says he. 'Prove it. Cut the booze and go to work.' 'Work won't do me any good,' I said. 'I've tried it, and it bored me worse than the other thing. When I'm bored, I naturally reach for a drink.' (There's a great truth in that, you know, Carty, if the temperance people would only grab it: boredom and booze --cause and effect.) 'That's a hot line of advice, Doc,' I said. 'Maybe you'll think better of it when you get my bill for fifty,' says he. (I got it, too. I've still got it.) 'I don't mean Wall Street, Cyrus,' says he. 'I mean work. You've never tried work. You've just played at it. I'll bet you a thousand,' he went on (he was playing me up to this all the time, Carty), 'that you'd starve in six months if you tried to make your living where nobody knows you.' Well, Carty, you know how I am with a bet. It comes just as natural to me to say 'You're on,' as 'Here's how,' or 'Have another.' I said it, and here I am. I'll bet Doc Gerritt's laughing yet,” he concluded with a wry face. “They say he's the best diagnostician going, in his own line.” The young clergyman studied Cyrus out of the corner of his eye. “I wouldn't wonder if it were true. How do you like the prescription so far?” “Interesting,” said Cyrus the Gaunt. “I've been hungry, and I've been lonely, and I've been scared, and I've even been near-yellow, but I haven't been bored for a minute. You never get bored, Carty, when you have the probabilities of your next meal to speculate on, pro and con. Odd jobs have been my stay mostly, before I landed this. And when there wasn't anything in my own line, I kept up my nerve by catching 'em on the way down and shoving 'em into jobs on Jink Hereford's Canadian preserve.”