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A few dilapidated gentlemen of the "learned profession," with sharp features and anxious faces, fuss about among the crowd, reeking of whiskey and tobacco. Now they whisper suspiciously in the ears of forlorn prisoners, now they struggle to get a market for their legal nostrums.
On examination, however, it proved to contain, not secrets of State, but recipes for dishes, drinks, medicines, washes, and all such matters of housewifery, the toilet, and domestic quackery, among which we were horrified by the title of one of the nostrums, "How to kill a Fellow quickly"! We never doubted that bloody Queen Bess might often have had occasion for such a recipe, but wondered at her frankness, and at her attending to these anomalous necessities in such a methodical way.
"After your Jewish physician, if he really be such, has vainly administered his nostrums and ineffectually mumbled his incantations, you will be glad enough to have the regular practitioner of the asylum resume the functions of which you now see fit so summarily to deprive him." "Perhaps," answered the Count, smiling. "It is part of my creed never to despise science in whatever form it may come!"
There were, of course, numerous nostrums warranted to allay the fiery tingling and maddening stinging of the malady, and, as I cheerfully adopted every suggestion that came to my ears, I was presently stocked up with enough salves and solutions to fill an apothecary-shop, and my associates began to complain that I was as redolent of odors as a chemical laboratory.
The only diseases which I observed to prevail among the Moors were the intermittent fever and dysentery; for the cure of which, nostrums are sometimes administered by their old women; but, in general, nature is left to her own operations.
On examination, however, it proved to contain, not secrets of state, but recipes for dishes, drinks, medicines, washes, and all such matters of housewifery, the toilet, and domestic quackery, among which we were horrified by the title of one of the nostrums, "How to kill a Fellow quickly"! We never doubted that bloody Queen Bess might often have had occasion for such a recipe, but wondered at her frankness, and at her attending to these anomalous necessities in such a methodical way.
There was the layman with a passion for homoeopathy, the ritualistic layman, the layman with a mania for preaching down trades' unions, the layman with an educational mania. All however agreed in one point, much as they differed in others, and the one point was that of a perfect belief in their individual nostrums and perfect contempt for all that was already doing in the neighbourhood.
But at the moment when Perregaud gave it to him the poisonous nostrums employed by La Constantin were already working in his blood. Violent fever ensued, and in three days the chevalier was dead. It was his funeral which had met Quennebert's wedding party at the church door. Everything turned out as Quennebert had anticipated.
"It is not," he said, "fatal to our Liberal friends to labour for Free Trade, Extension of the Suffrage, and Abolition of Church Rates, instead of graver social ends; but it is fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, with our social condition what it is, that they have performed a great, a heroic work, by occupying themselves exclusively, for the last thirty years, with these Liberal nostrums."
But it was soon found that the average fruit-grower would not take the trouble to spray his trees, largely from the fact that he had experimented for some years with inferior washes and quack nostrums, and from lack of success had become disgusted with the whole idea of using liquid compounds. Something easier, something more radical was necessary in his disheartened condition.
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