SEVERE ON THE DOCTORS.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 5423, 2 July 1879, Page 3

SEVERE ON THE DOCTORS.

The) gifted daughter of the late Theophile Gautier, Madame Judith Gautier, has just published, under the title of Les JPeuples etranges, a companion to her quaint adaptations from the Chinese, Le Dragon Imperial and JLe Lwre de Jade. The following story, which I ("Atlas " in the World) find in it, appears to have retained all its Oriental flavor. It seems that in the Celestial country the ghosts of the patients despatched by a physician are in the habit of haunting the door of his house at night till the time of his own death. One night the son of a merchant wanted a doctor for a member of his family, and went out in search of one. He found such a number of ghosts waiting at the doors of the fashionable practitioners, that he did not care to enter any one of them. Thus he surveyed all the citj ; and at last, in a dark alley, he alighted on a doctor's brass plate, and at this door there were only two ghosts. As a matter of course he knocked, and was ushered into the presence of a very young physician. " O," said the applicant, "how long have you been in practice ?" " Only from this morning," was the prompt reply. Upon this the merchant's son came to the conclusion that he had better dispense altogether with a physician.