If you were all Thousand Dollar Bonds you would all earn fifty dollars a year; if you were all Pennies, you would earn half a mill. If you were all Locomotives you could draw a train; if you were all Mice, you could draw a spool of thread. You are all equal in birth, you are all equal before the law, you are all born to 5 per cent. But the equality begins and ends there.” He cast a withering glance at the Half Dollar, and concluded thus: “I am sorry to say that we have among us a few would-be Aristocrats, who claim a fictitious superiority not recognizable by the Constitution of our democracy. It profits them nothing. They get but their 5 per cent; and they get it on what they are, not on what they pretend to be.”
Observation. This fable teaches us that the character of the Equality established by our laws is commonly misunderstood on both sides of the water; and not oftener by the ignorant than by the ostensibly wise.
Are all dentists active talkers? And have they come by this gift by inheritance? The barber was the first dentist; he had been pulling teeth for thousands of years before the earliest dental specialist made his appearance and became his professional child and heir; for thousands of years he had been the talker of talkers, and when his heir inherited and carried off the pattern of his barber-chair for use in the new field, doubtless he inherited along with it the barber’s facility of speech, the gradually and patiently perfected marvel of those ages of faithful and pains-taking practice.
But these are deep questions of theology, philology, mathematics; with them we have nothing to do. We will come to the point. I was not able to remember that I had ever sat in a dentist’s chair; I was not able to remember that I had ever had a pain in any tooth. And so it was a cold awakening to me when a dentist who had caught a fleeting glimpse of my interior when I was laughing at something which spread me wider open than usual, told me I ought to go to Dr. Riggs and get my teeth attended to. He said I had a certain disease of the teeth which had a scientific name but was sometimes called “Riggs’s disease” because Dr. Riggs had invented a method of treating it which cured it in some instances and arrested its progress and rendered it harmless in all; whereas it had formerly refused to succumb to dental science. Having got a vicious looking gouging-iron out of his pocket to fondle, his gift of talk came to him at once, just the same as if he had been behind his chair with a waiting subject paling under him, and proceeded with his flow. He said that most people had Riggs’s disease, especially people whose teeth appeared to be perfectly sound and flawless; said one did not often find it with bad teeth; said it was heritable—where it existed in the parents, it would usually be found in the children. He said it was in the nature of blood poisoning; a secretion decayed the bone-surface of the roots of the teeth, then the gums retreated from these surfaces, pus was engendered in the gums, the teeth began to loosen, and the man’s general health was injured. He said that Dr. Riggs’s method was to dig up under the gums with his instruments and carve and scrape all the dead bone away, down to the living bone; then the gums would return to their place, attach themselves to the living bone, and become healthy again. Then he went on to say that talk was generally wasted on a Riggs disease victim; there being no pain, they didn’t mind the disease, and they did mind the desperate operation required to check the malady. By way of example, he instanced the case of a young woman who came to him to have her teeth examined. They were beautifully white and regular, and perfectly sound, and he told her so; but he also told her that the whole thirty-two were in danger, because Riggs’s disease was at their roots. She was a teacher, and had a salary of seven or eight hundred dollars; but she refused to pay “any such price;” she hadn’t any pain, and didn’t choose to import any; she wouldn’t take all that proposed thirty-two batches of agony as a gift, let alone go into the market and buy it. When the dentist had got this far, his gouging-iron slipped out of his hand, and this broke his connection and gave me a chance to get on first base with a question: which was, why he didn’t propose to operate upon my Riggs disease himself. He said he doubted if any dentist could do the work quite as well as Riggs himself.
Dr. Riggs lives in my own town; so, when I reached home, I went to him. He was gray and venerable, and humane of aspect; but he had the calm, possessed, surgical look of a man who could endure pain in another person. I got in the chair and looked about me, noting the cuspidor at my left elbow, the convenient glass of water; the table at my right covered with long steel bodkins laid out in rows on a white napkin; then laid my head back in the rest, feeling pale and nervous, for this thing was all new to me; new and hellish, if I may use such a word without offense. The doctor bent over me, I spread my mouth, and he put a mirror the size of a nickel into it, and inspected it all around. And began to talk. Not swiftly, not excitedly; but evenly, smoothly, tranquilly.
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