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We are not so clever, not we! We are not savants, coxcombs, fops! We are practitioners; we cure people, and we should not dream of operating on anyone who is in perfect health. Straighten club-feet! As if one could straighten club-feet! It is as if one wished, for example, to make a hunchback straight!"

Beside these master paralysers, so expert in the art of dealing slow death, there are those which, with a precision no less scholarly, kill and wither their victims at a single stroke, and without leaving a trace: "true practitioners in crime."

Maitre Laurent, though he was perfectly sure of himself, carefully read the inscriptions upon those he had selected several times over, held up the tiny vials one after another, where a ray of sunshine struck upon them, and looked admiringly through the bright transparent liquids they contained then, measuring with the utmost care a few drops from each, compounded a potion after a secret recipe of his own; which he made a mystery of, and refused to impart to his fellow practitioners.

It had so happened, however, that on that very day, the funeral of a young man was to have taken place, who had put up for a time at that same inn where Admiral Bell was first introduced to the reader. He had become seriously ill, and, after a few days of indisposition, which had puzzled the country practitioners, breathed his last.

I remember we talked about the topics that used to be popular at Biggleswick the big political things that begin with capital letters. He took Amos's view of the soundness of the British working-man, but he said something which made me think. He was convinced that there was a tremendous lot of German spy work about, and that most of the practitioners were innocent.

What right have we to laugh? We live in an enlightened age, and yet a great proportion of the people, perhaps not a majority, still believe in incantations, have faith in ignorant practitioners who advertise a "natural gift," or a secret process or remedy, and prefer the charlatan who is exactly on the level of the Indian Medicine Man, to the regular practitioner, and to the scientific student of mind and body and of the properties of the materia medica.

John Clark's "books and instruments, with several chirurgery materials in the closet," a were valued in his inventory at sixty pounds; Dr. Matthew Fuller, who died in 1678, left a library valued at ten pounds; and a surgeon's chest and drugs valued at sixteen pounds. Here we leave the first century and all attempts at any further detailed accounts of medicine and its practitioners.

It seems that in Russia, outside the large cities and communities, there is a great scarcity of regularly licensed medical practitioners, many of these latter upon graduation enter the army where the pay is fairly good and the work comparatively easy, the rest of them enter the cities where, of course, practice is larger and the remuneration much better than would be possible in a small community.

Yet we must own that it may have been indirectly useful, as the older farce of the weapon ointment certainly was, in teaching medical practitioners to place more reliance upon nature. Most scientific men see through its deceptions at a glance. It may be practised by shrewd men and by honest ones; rarely, it must be feared, by those who are both shrewd and honest.

Externally, I find the practitioners on whom I have chiefly relied used the plasters of Paracelsus, of melilot, diachylon, and probably diaphoenicon, all well known to the old pharmacopoeias, and some of them to the modern ones, to say nothing of "my yellow salve," of Governor John, the second, for the composition of which we must apply to his respected descendant.