h the air of vivid interest, but
gradually, while the other was still talking, another strange caprice
came over him, and he presented the aspect of the most calamitous
dejection.

"How now?" said the herb-doctor.

"You told me to have confidence, said that confidence was indispensable,
and here you preach to me distrust. Ah, truth will out!"

"I told you, you must have confidence, unquestioning confidence, I meant
confidence in the genuine medicine, and the genuine _me_."

"But in your absence, buying vials purporting to be yours, it seems I
cannot have unquestioning confidence."

"Prove all the vials; trust those which are true."

"But to doubt, to suspect, to prove--to have all this wearing work to
be doing continually--how opposed to confidence. It is evil!"

"From evil comes good. Distrust is a stage to confidence. How has it
proved in our interview? But your voice is husky; I have let you talk
too much. You hold your cure; I will leave you. But stay--when I hear
that health is yours, I will not, like some I know, vainly make boasts;
but, giving glory where all glory is due, say, with the devout
herb-doctor, Japus in Virgil, when, in the unseen but efficacious
presence of Venus, he with simples healed the wound of AEneas:--

'This is no mortal work, no cure of mine,
Nor art's effect, but done by power divine.'"

CHAPTER XVII.

TOWARDS THE END OF WHICH THE HERB-DOCTOR PROVES HIMSELF A FORGIVER OF
INJURIES.

In a kind of ante-cabin, a number of respectable looking people, male
and female, way-passengers, recently come on board, are listlessly
sitting in a mutually shy sort of silence.

Holding up a small, square bottle, ovally labeled with the engraving of
a countenance full of soft pity as that of the Romish-painted Madonna,
the herb-doctor passes slowly among them, benignly urbane, turning this
way and that, saying:--

"Ladies and gentlemen, I hold in my hand here the Samaritan Pain
Dissuader, thrice-blessed discovery of that disinterested friend of
humanity whose portrait you see. Pure vegetable extract. Warranted to
remove the acutest pain within less than ten minutes. Five hundred
dollars to be forfeited on failure. Especially efficacious in heart
disease and tic-douloureux. Observe the expression of this pledged
friend of humanity.--Price only fifty cents."

In vain. After the first idle stare, his auditors--in pretty good
health, it seemed--instead of encouraging his politenes