"Mercy, mercy!" cried the old miser, "what is all this!--ugh, ugh! Do talk sense, my good friends. Ain't you," to the Missourian, "going to buy some of that medicine?" "Pray, my venerable friend," said the herb-doctor, now trying to straighten himself, "don't lean _quite_ so hard; my arm grows numb; abate a little, just a very little." "Go," said the Missourian, "go lay down in your grave, old man, if you can't stand of yourself. It's a hard world for a leaner." "As to his grave," said the herb-doctor, "that is far enough off, so he but faithfully take my medicine." "Ugh, ugh, ugh!--He says true. No, I ain't--ugh! a going to die yet--ugh, ugh, ugh! Many years to live yet, ugh, ugh, ugh!" "I approve your confidence," said the herb-doctor; "but your coughing distresses me, besides being injurious to you. Pray, let me conduct you to your berth. You are best there. Our friend here will wait till my return, I know." With which he led the old miser away, and then, coming back, the talk with the Missourian was resumed. "Sir," said the herb-doctor, with some dignity and more feeling, "now that our infirm friend is withdrawn, allow me, to the full, to express my concern at the words you allowed to escape you in his hearing. Some of those words, if I err not, besides being calculated to beget deplorable distrust in the patient, seemed fitted to convey unpleasant imputations against me, his physician." "Suppose they did?" with a menacing air. "Why, then--then, indeed," respectfully retreating, "I fall back upon my previous theory of your general facetiousness. I have the fortune to be in company with a humorist--a wag." "Fall back you had better, and wag it is," cried the Missourian, following him up, and wagging his raccoon tail almost into the herb-doctor's face, "look you!" "At what?" "At this coon. Can you, the fox, catch him?" "If you mean," returned the other, not unselfpossessed, "whether I flatter myself that I can in any way dupe you, or impose upon you, or pass myself off upon you for what I am not, I, as an honest man, answer that I have neither the inclination nor the power to do aught of the kind." "Honest man? Seems to me you talk more like a craven." "You in vain seek to pick a quarrel with me, or put any affront upon me. The innocence in me heals me." "A healing like your own nostrums. But you are a queer man--a very queer and dubious man; upon the whole, about the most so I ever met." The scrutiny accompanying this seemed unwelcome to the diffidence of the herb-doctor. As if at once to attest the absence of resentment, as well as to change the subject, he threw a kind of familiar cordiality into his air, and said: "So you are going to get some machine made to do your work? Philanthropic scruples, doubtless, forbid your going as far as New Orleans for slaves?"