Often had I regretted that she never had heard me on the footboard, and that she never could hear me.  It ain’t that I am vain, but that you don’t like to put your own light under a bushel.  What’s the worth of your reputation, if you can’t convey the reason for it to the person you most wish to value it?  Now I’ll put it to you.  Is it worth sixpence, fippence, fourpence, threepence, twopence, a penny, a halfpenny, a farthing?  No, it ain’t.  Not worth a farthing.  Very well, then.  My conclusion was that I would begin her book with some account of myself.  So that, through reading a specimen or two of me on the footboard, she might form an idea of my merits there.  I was aware that I couldn’t do myself justice.  A man can’t write his eye (at least I don’t know how to), nor yet can a man write his voice, nor the rate of his talk, nor the quickness of his action, nor his general spicy way.  But he can write his turns of speech, when he is a public speaker,—­and indeed I have heard that he very often does, before he speaks ’em.

Well!  Having formed that resolution, then come the question of a name.  How did I hammer that hot iron into shape?  This way.  The most difficult explanation I had ever had with her was, how I come to be called Doctor, and yet was no Doctor.  After all, I felt that I had failed of getting it correctly into her mind, with my utmost pains.  But trusting to her improvement in the two years, I thought that I might trust to her understanding it when she should come to read it as put down by my own hand.  Then I thought I would try a joke with her and watch how it took, by which of itself I might fully judge of her understanding it.  We had first discovered the mistake we had dropped into, through her having asked me to prescribe for her when she had supposed me to be a Doctor in a medical point of view; so thinks I, “Now, if I give this book the name of my Prescriptions, and if she catches the idea that my only Prescriptions are for her amusement and interest,—­to make her laugh in a pleasant way, or to make her cry in a pleasant way,—­it will be a delightful proof to both of us that we have got over our difficulty.”  It fell out to absolute perfection.  For when she saw the book, as I had it got up,—­the printed and pressed book,—­lying on her desk in her cart, and saw the title, doctor marigold’s prescriptions, she looked at me for a moment with astonishment, then fluttered the leaves, then broke out a laughing in the charmingest way, then felt her pulse and shook her head, then turned the pages pretending to read them most attentive, then kissed the book to me, and put it to her bosom with both her hands.  I never was better pleased in all my life!