Cannot the reader avouch for the reputed extensive rides of some country doctor, who, without a known patient, harnessed his bare-ribbed old horse to his crazy gig, and drove furiously about the country, returning by a roundabout way, without having made a single professional visit, thereby humbugging the honest country people into a belief that he had innumerable patients in his route? To quite another class of humbugs belongs the subject of the following sketch. I have had the pleasure of meeting him but twice--may I never meet him again. The first interview was at the board of a country hotel. [Illustration: GRACE BEFORE MEAT.] I had arrived late at evening by rail, and ordered a light supper. When the tea-bell had summoned me, I found a large, phlegmatic individual seated opposite at the table, who possibly had arrived by the same conveyance as myself. His person was quite repulsive. He was probably fifty years of age, his eyes watery and restless, his thin stock of hair--indicating a corresponding poverty of brain--black, streaked by gray, was stuck back professionally (!) over a low bump of veneration, and high organs of firmness and self-esteem, which, with a Roman nose, large, protruding under jaw, and wide, open mouth, gave him a striking appearance, at least. But what was most observable was his thin, uneven, scraggy whiskers, uncombed, and besmeared by tobacco juice and bits of the weed, drooling down over their uncertain length, over waistcoat, and so out of sight below the table. His coat sleeves had evidently been substituted for a handkerchief when too great a surplus of tobacco juice obstructed his face. He bent his great, watery eyes over towards me, and opened the ball by suggesting that I ask a blessing over the food so bountifully and temptingly laid before us. Having too much compassion on the present exhausted state of my stomach to disregard its immediate demands, and too little confidence in the veneration of my _vis-a-vis_ to return the request, I went to eating, while he closed one eye, keeping the other on a plate of hot steak just placed before him by the table girl. I have since been strongly reminded of him by the character "Bishopriggs," in Wilkie Collins's book, "_Man and Wife_." I think, however, for hypocrisy, the present subject exceeded Bishopriggs. Having wagged his enormous jaw a few times, by way of grace, he began eating and conversing alternately. "I take it, friend, you're a railroad conductor, coming in so late," he suggested, between mouthfuls. "No," was my brief reply. "Perhaps, cap'n, you're a drummer. Sell dry or wet goods?" "No." "A newspaper man?" I merely shook my head. "Then a patent medicine vender?" "No!" emphatically. "Not a minister," he asserted. "Perhaps a doctor," he perseveringly continued. "Yes, sir; I am a physician."