354: MEN I HAVE FISHED WITH. 



Christmas. He will get up this dinner in honor of your return 

 to civilization. A few of your old-time friends will be there 

 not many, for there is only one 'coon; but what they lack in 

 numbers they will make up in quality. Tobi Teller has seen the 

 list, and pronounced it 'a small party, but intensely respectable/ 

 Jim Lansing said: Tort has killed the fatted 'coon; the calf has 

 returned.' Don't fail to be with us, for Old Port will not be 

 able to skin a muskrat in a month if you disappoint him. It 

 isn't often he gets a 'coon about here, and yesterday he brought 

 one in and said: 'This is just the thing to get up a dinner for 

 Fred.' So never mind your liver nor your ague, but come. 

 Let me know at once, but don't refuse. 



MARTIN MILLER." 



Dr. Jones said that if I wished to shake off the accu- 

 mulated malaria of years I must be very careful in the 

 matter of diet, and that a roast 'coon might do a lot of 

 things which I can't now recall, but to which I gave re- 

 spectful attention. There is no possible use in employing 

 a doctor unless you put yourself in his hands and obey 

 his orders. That is merely common sense. Yet I went 

 to the dinner. How true it is that "all the good things 

 have been said," and that when we read a good book it 

 seems as if the author had somehow forestalled our 

 thoughts before we got to the point of writing them. 

 Honore de Balzac said: "I can resist anything but temp- 

 tation." I had often acted on this saying, but could 

 never have formulated it. I acted on it in the case of 

 this invitation. Away with Dr. Jones and his hygienic 

 treatment of a disordered liver! Was I to become a slave 

 to a disgruntled gland? Never! "Enslave a man and 

 you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity." 



Climbing the hill which is now Mechanic street, but 

 then was known as the road between the woods, the cot- 

 tage where that modern Natty Bumpo lived was entered, 



