"Either it is distressingly healthy here, or the good people are afraid to trust their lives and healths in the hands of an inexperienced physician," he remarked to a friend to whom he applied for means for a new start elsewhere. "And where will you try your luck next?" inquired his friend. "In New York city." "In New York city?" "Yes, and I shall there succeed," he exclaimed, with great determination. "Well, I hope in my heart of hearts you will," was his friend's reply, as he kindly loaned him the required sum of money. Had his friend asked the advice of a third party before making the loan, doubtless the answer would have been something like the following, though it was respecting another case:-- "Dr. J. wants me to loan him some money for thirty days; do you suppose he will refund it?" "What! lend him money?" was the reply. "He return it? No, sir; if you lend that man an emetic he would never _return_ it." On his borrowed funds,--neither principal nor interest of which his kind friend ever expected him to be able to return,--the doctor entered the great metropolis. He hired a house in a respectable locality, and hung out his sign. During his long quiet days in the country village he had read a great deal, and was "up to the tricks" of his predecessors. He had particularly posted himself on the ways and means resorted to by some of those physicians, of whom we have already made brief mention, for getting into practice. [Illustration: COMMENCING A PRACTICE IN NEW YORK.] "What avails it that I know as much as other physicians who have entered upon a practice? What does my diploma amount to if I have no patients?" he asked himself over and again. Practice was now his want, and this is the way he obtained it. Having read of a celebrated physician, who kept his few patients a long time in waiting, under pretence that he was preoccupied by the many who fortunately had preceded, our young physician adopted that great man's tactics. For want of patients to keep in waiting, he hired some decently dressed lackeys to apply regularly at his front door, at specified times, and wait till the colored servant admitted them, one at a time. Each was passed out after a half hour's supposed consultation, and the next admitted. The neighbors and others passing, seeing patients continually in waiting, some with a hand, a foot, face, or other parts bound up, were led to read his sign, and soon a _bona fide_ patient applied, who, in turn, was kept waiting a long time, notwithstanding the young doctor's anxiety to finger a real medical fee from his first New York patient. Others followed, the lackeys were dismissed, and the physician's practice was established. His merit kept what his shrewdness had obtained.