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"It is an omen," said Superstition simply; and Reason stood convicted as an empty braggart. But if Time be the great healer, Dinner is at least a clever quack, and when he and old Mr. Rentoul had consumed well-nigh a bottle and a half of their host's port between them, the outlook became much less gloomy.
Quack nor I had lost a feather from those terrible guns that had banged at us all the way up and that had killed so many of our friends. "We were flying up the Big River, and everything seemed perfectly safe. We were in a hurry, and when we came to a bend in the Big River, we flew quite close to shore, so as not to have to go way out and around. That was where Mr. Quack made a mistake.
As I was impatient to know the occasion and nature of her calamity, she gave me to understand, that she was a woman of the town by profession; that in the course of her adventures she found herself dangerously infected with a distemper, to which all of her class are particularly subject; that her malady gaining ground every day, she became loathsome to herself and offensive to others: when she resolved to retire to some obscure corner where she might be cured with as little noise and expense as possible; that she had accordingly chosen this place of retreat, and put herself into the hands of an advertising doctor, who having fleeced her of all the money she had, or could procure, left her three days ago in a worse condition than that in which he found her; that except the clothes on her back, she had pawned or sold everything that belonged to her to satisfy that rapacious quack, and quiet the clamour of her landlady, who still persisted in her threats to turn her out into the street.
"Well, Milly: what's up?" he asked, cheerfully enough in tone, but with a sinking heart. "I want to know what you're going to do for me?" "Something wrong?" "You've got a right to know. I'm in trouble." "What kind of trouble?" "The kind you make money out of with your Relief Pills." "Milly! Milly!" cried the quack, in honest distress. "I wouldn't have believed it of you."
"What have I ever done that he should be so anxious to kill me?" Still the hunter sat without moving. Mr. and Mrs. Quack contentedly hunted for food in the mud at the bottom of Paddy's pond. Bobby Coon finished his meal, crossed the dam and disappeared in the Green Forest. He had gone off to take a nap somewhere. Time slipped away.
In spite of the fact that everyone and anyone seemed to be permitted, and was considered fitted to prescribe medicine, the colonists were sharp enough on the venders of quack medicines or, perhaps I should say, of powerless medicines on "runnagate chyrurgeons and physickemongers, saltimbancoes, quacksalvers, charlatans, and all impostourous empiricks."
There was a dowager whose aristocratic name appeared daily on the fourth page of the newspapers, attesting the merits of some kind of quack medicine; and a retired opera-singer, who, having been called Zenaide Rochet till she grew up in Montmartre, where she was born, had had a brilliant career as a star in Italy under the name of Zina Rochette.
Quack calling excitedly out in the middle of the Big River, but the strangers did not heed her. They had their eyes on those wooden Ducks and were coming straight in to join them. "They think they are real Ducks and so this place is perfectly safe!" thought Sammy.
Your impression may be that a lethargy prevails, where, in reality, dangerous fever is the disease a fever that must one day break out violently, in spite of the quack medicines administered by an incapable Government in spite of the restrictions unsparingly employed, by that grim sick-nurse, martial law.
Go before the magistrate.... Get Lord Elling to issue a warrant to prevent a breach of the peace. No; that won't do. This quack of a major in the army's to call to-morrow. I don't mind, if he shows his credentials all clear, amusing him in any manner he likes. I can't see the best scheme. Hang it, Ned, it's very hard upon me to ask me to do the thinking.
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