ter struck his staff upon the stones of
the Great Place, and instantly arose the liveliest booths and stalls, and
sittings and standings, and a pleasant hum of chaffering and huckstering
from many hundreds of tongues, and a pleasant, though peculiar, blending
of colours,--white caps, blue blouses, and green vegetables,--and at last
the Knight destined for the adventure seemed to have come in earnest, and
all the Vaubanois sprang up awake. And now, by long, low-lying avenues
of trees, jolting in white-hooded donkey-cart, and on donkey-back, and in
tumbril and wagon, and cart and cabriolet, and afoot with barrow and
burden,--and along the dikes and ditches and canals, in little
peak-prowed country boats,--came peasant-men and women in flocks and
crowds, bringing articles for sale. And here you had boots and shoes,
and sweetmeats and stuffs to wear, and here (in the cool shade of the
Town-hall) you had milk and cream and butter and cheese, and here you had
fruits and onions and carrots, and all things needful for your soup, and
here you had poultry and flowers and protesting pigs, and here new
shovels, axes, spades, and bill-hooks for your farming work, and here
huge mounds of bread, and here your unground grain in sacks, and here
your children's dolls, and here the cake-seller, announcing his wares by
beat and roll of drum. And hark! fanfaronade of trumpets, and here into
the Great Place, resplendent in an open carriage, with four gorgeously-
attired servitors up behind, playing horns, drums, and cymbals, rolled
"the Daughter of a Physician" in massive golden chains and ear-rings, and
blue-feathered hat, shaded from the admiring sun by two immense umbrellas
of artificial roses, to dispense (from motives of philanthropy) that
small and pleasant dose which had cured so many thousands! Toothache,
earache, headache, heartache, stomach-ache, debility, nervousness, fits,
fainting, fever, ague, all equally cured by the small and pleasant dose
of the great Physician's great daughter! The process was this,--she, the
Daughter of a Physician, proprietress of the superb equipage you now
admired with its confirmatory blasts of trumpet, drum, and cymbal, told
you so: On the first day after taking the small and pleasant dose, you
would feel no particular influence beyond a most harmonious sensation of
indescribable and irresistible joy; on the second day you would be so
astonishingly better that you would think yourself changed into s