Page:A La California.djvu/253

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HEALTH TO THE WIDOW.
209

again in my presence! You are a free and enlighened American citizen; smoked a trifle, I admit; but what is ham until it is smoked? Who objects to smoke? Another widow! First, the Widow of Garcia; then the Widow Cliquot! Respect for the widows is one of the most striking characteristics of the true gentleman, and I am overflowing with it. Here's to them all!

Not much luck to-day, Doctor? Well, the exercise will do you good, and that is a consolation at any rate. You certainly needed it. People in San Francisco eat too much and drink too much, take too much sleep and too little pedestrian exercise. They don't perspire from one year's end to the next. There is all the difference in the world between this climate and that of San Francisco; and, if I am not mistaken, there is still more between this and what you were used to the season you hibernated up there in the Sierra Nevada?

Yes, there is some difference, and no mistake. Many a night I have curled myself up under three pairs of California eight-pound blankets and shivered all night long. While you are in motion you do not feel the cold so much, but when once you lie down and attempt to sleep, it would take a pile of blankets like Mount St. Helena over there to keep you from freezing to death, unless you had a roaring fire going all the time on one of those stormy nights. And a physician has almost a dead certainty of being called out on the darkest and wildest nights for his longest rides to attend on patients who cannot wait a moment under