rday! That was for a smaller bottle, sir.
Same size, as this, was it? Ah, yes, I gave you a large bottle by
mistake,--so you owe me fifty cents. Never mind, don't give it back.
I'll take the half dollar.")

All of this had been spoken with the utmost volubility. As I listened I
almost fancied myself again in England, and at a country fair. Taking in
his audience at a glance, I saw his eye rest on me ere it flitted, and he
resumed,--

"We gypsies are, as you know, a remarkable race, and possessed of certain
rare secrets, which have all been formulated, concentrated, dictated, and
plenipotentiarated into this idealized Elixir. If I were a mountebank or
a charlatan I would claim that it cures a hundred diseases. Charlatan is
a French word for a quack. I speak French, gentlemen; I speak nine
languages, and can tell you the Hebrew for an old umbrella. The Gypsy's
Elixir cures colds, gout, all nervous affections, with such cutaneous
disorders as are diseases of the skin, debility, sterility, hostility,
and all the illities that flesh is heir to except what it can't, such as
small-pox and cholera. It has cured cholera, but it don't claim to do
it. Others claim to cure, but can't. I am not a charlatan, but an
Ann-Eliza. That is the difference between me and a lady, as the pig said
when he astonished his missus by blushing at her remarks to the postman.
(_Better have another bottle_, _sir_. _Haven't you the change_? _Never
mind_, _you can owe me fifty cents_. _I know a gentleman when I see
one_.) I was recently Down East in Maine, where they are so patriotic,
they all put the stars and stripes into their beds for sheets, have the
Fourth of July three hundred and sixty-five times in the year, and eat
the Declaration of Independence for breakfast. And they wouldn't buy a
bottle of my Gypsy's Elixir till they heard it was good for the
Constitution, whereupon they immediately purchased my entire stock.
Don't lose time in securing this invaluable blessing to those who feel
occasional pains in the lungs. This is not taradiddle. I am engaged to
lecture this afternoon before the Medical Association of Germantown, as
on Wednesday before the University of Baltimore; for though I sell
medicine here in the streets, it is only, upon my word of honor, that the
poor may benefit, and the lowly as well as the learned know how to prize
the philanthropic and eccentric gypsy."

He run on with his patter for some time in this v