he interior of the sufferer with a large
gourdful of this pleasing mixture at regular intervals. It was
efficacious, too. The inundated person either got well or else he
drowned from the inside. Rocking the patient was almost as dangerous a
pastime as rocking the boat. This also helps to explain, I think, why so
many of our forebears had floating kidneys. There was nothing else for a
kidney to do.

By the time I attained to long trousers, people in our town mainly had
outgrown the unlicensed expert and were depending more and more upon the
old-fashioned family doctor--the one with the whisker-jungle--who drove
about in a gig, accompanied by a haunting aroma of iodoform and carrying
his calomel with him in bulk.

He probably owned a secret calomel mine of his own. He must have;
otherwise he could never have afforded to be so generous with it. He
also had other medicines with him, all of them being selected on the
principle that unless a drug tasted like the very dickens it couldn't
possibly do you any good. At all hours of the day and night he was to
be seen going to and fro, distributing nuggets from his private lode. He
went to bed with his trousers and his hat on, I think, and there was a
general belief that his old mare slept between the shafts of the gig,
with the bridle shoved up on her forehead.

It has been only a few years since the oldtime general practitioner was
everywhere. Just look round and see now how the system has changed! If
your liver begins to misconduct itself the first thought of the modern
operator is to cut it out and hide it some place where you can't find
it. The oldtimer would have bombarded it with a large brunette pill
about the size and color of a damson plum. Or he might put you on a
diet of molasses seasoned to taste with blue mass and quinine and other
attractive condiments. Likewise, in the spring of the year he frequently
anointed the young of the species with a mixture of mutton suet and
asafetida. This treatment had an effect that was distinctly depressing
upon the growing boy. It militated against his popularity. It forced him
to seek his pleasures outdoors, and a good distance outdoors at that.

It was very hard for a boy, however naturally attractive he might be,
to retain his popularity at the fireside circle when coated with
mutton suet and asafetida and then taken into a warm room. He attracted
attention which he did not court and which was distasteful to him.
Keeping quiet