This fellow, whom I am now to describe, who sometimes prefixes "professor" to his name, was born in the State of New Hampshire, and when a young man came to this city to seek his fortune. After various ups and downs, he became boot-black, porter, and general lackey in the Pearl Street House, then in full blast. He was said to be a youth of rather prepossessing, though insinuating address, and being constantly on the alert for odd pennies and "dimes," succeeded in keeping himself in pocket-money without committing theft, or otherwise compromising his liberty. But the odd change, and his meagre salary, did not long remain in pocket, for the courtesans, who are ever on the alert for unsophisticated youth who throng to the cities, managed to obtain the lion's share from this embryo doctor, whose future greatness he himself never half suspected. Disease, the usual result of intercourse with such creatures, was the consequent inheritance of this young man.
"What, in the name of Heaven, shall I now do?" he asked himself, in his distress and despair. "Money I have none. O God! what shall I do?"
Such fellows seldom drown. Females, their victims, drown; but who ever heard of a natural-born villain committing suicide, unless to escape the threatening halter?
No, he did not drown, though it had been better for humanity if he had. He went to an old advertising charlatan, who then kept an office in a lower street of this city, a mercenary old vampire, named Stevens. Into the august presence of the charlatan young M. entered, and, trembling and weeping, told his history.
[Illustration: A BOSTON QUACK EXAMINING A STUDENT.]
"Have you got any money, young man?" growled the old doctor, wheeling around, and for the first time condescending to notice the poor wretch.
"Then what do you come here for, sir?" roared the doctor, whose pity was a thing of the past. His soul was impenetrable to the appeal of suffering as the hide of the rhinoceros to a leaden bullet.
The young man, fortunately, did not know this fact, and persevered.
"I thought I might work for you to pay for treatment. O, I'll do anything--sweep your office, wash up the floors and bottles, black your boots, do anything and everything, if you'll only cure me. O, do! Say you will, sir!" and the young man writhed in agony of suspense.