and say that because the doctors were not nearly
so numerous then as they are now, those persons are still living so
numerously.

In the spring of the year, when the sap flowed and the birds mated, the
sturdy farmer felt that he was due to have something the matter with
him, too. So he would ride into the country-seat and get an almanac.
Doubtless the reader, if country raised, has seen copies of this popular
work. On the outside cover, which was dark blue in color, there was
a picture of a person whose stomach was sliced four ways, like a
twenty-cent pie, and then folded back neatly, thus exposing his entire
interior arrangements to the gaze of the casual observer. However, this
party, judging by his picture, did not appear to be suffering. He did
not even seem to fear that he might catch cold from standing there in
his own draught. He was gazing off into space in an absent-minded kind
of way, apparently not aware that anything was wrong with him; and on
all sides he was surrounded by interesting exhibits, such as a crab, and
a scorpion, and a goat, and a chap with a bow and arrow--and one thing
and another.

Such was the main design of the cover, while the contents were made up
of recognized and standard varieties in the line of jokes and the line
of diseases which alternated, with first a favorite joke and then a
favorite disease. The author who wrote the descriptions of the diseases
was one of the most convincing writers that ever lived anywhere. As a
realist he had no superiors among those using our language as a vehicle
for the expression of thought. He was a wonder. If a person wasn't
particular about what ailed him he could read any page at random and
have one specific disease. Or he could read the whole book through and
have them all, in their most advanced stages. Then the only thing that
could save him was a large dollar bottle.

Again, in attacks of the breakbone ague or malaria it was customary
to call in a local practitioner, generally an elderly lady of the
neighborhood who had none of these latter-day prejudices regarding the
use of tobacco by the gentler sex. One whom I distantly recall, among
childhood's happy memories, carried this liberal-mindedness to a point
where she not only dipped snuff and smoked a cob pipe, but sometimes
chewed a little natural leaf. This lady, on being called in, would brew
up a large caldron of medicinal roots and barks and sprouts and things;
and then she would deluge t