\ i f 



A WOED TO THE SUBSCKIBEES 



OP 



THE MOUNTAIN. 



FRIEND SUBSCRIBER: 



Are you a country doctor? Do you "pull teeth?" 

 Are you your own cupper, bleeder, leecher? Are you 

 your own druggist, filling out in detail your own pre- 

 scriptions? Are you surgeon, midwife, general practi- 

 tioner ; and have you no time to get fame and money 

 through any of the specialties of the profession dis- 

 eases of eye, ear, lung, stomach and bowel, cerebro-spinal 

 axis, women and children, because you are "boy of all 

 work," and have to treat them all? Are you occa- 

 sionally pig, cow, and horse doctor for the neighbors ? 

 Are your, patients scattered over a large and diversified 

 surface, which you must traverse on horseback, through 

 swampy roads, wildernesses of fallen timber, traps, dead- 

 falls of roots, and endless continuities of black forests; 

 and do you really go in all sorts of weather? Are your 

 patients so inaccessible that most of your time is con- 

 sumed in merely destroying space to get to them ; and 

 have you actually anything to do in your profession; 

 and when you do your work, have you five times as much 

 trouble to get your bills as to make them at first, your 

 patients knowing better than you do, what you ought to 

 charge, and just when they ought to pay ? Possibly, to 

 get along, you may be trying to farm a little, endeavor- 

 ing to scratch some hard patch of desolation into agri- 

 cultural propriety, or bravely to make, like the hero of 

 "Life in the Woods," some tough glebe "say beans!" 

 This is all very well, and no doubt you will have your 

 reward in heaven. But permit me to ask you a few more 

 questions, absurd and ridiculous as such questions may 

 appear to common sense and improbable as it may be 



SJ37S837 



