Town-hall) you had milk and cream and butter and cheese, and here you had
fruits and onions and carrots, and all things needful for your soup, and
here you had poultry and flowers and protesting pigs, and here new
shovels, axes, spades, and bill-hooks for your farming work, and here
huge mounds of bread, and here your unground grain in sacks, and here
your children's dolls, and here the cake-seller, announcing his wares by
beat and roll of drum. And hark! fanfaronade of trumpets, and here into
the Great Place, resplendent in an open carriage, with four gorgeously-
attired servitors up behind, playing horns, drums, and cymbals, rolled
"the Daughter of a Physician" in massive golden chains and ear-rings, and
blue-feathered hat, shaded from the admiring sun by two immense umbrellas
of artificial roses, to dispense (from motives of philanthropy) that
small and pleasant dose which had cured so many thousands! Toothache,
earache, headache, heartache, stomach-ache, debility, nervousness, fits,
fainting, fever, ague, all equally cured by the small and pleasant dose
of the great Physician's great daughter! The process was this,--she, the
Daughter of a Physician, proprietress of the superb equipage you now
admired with its confirmatory blasts of trumpet, drum, and cymbal, told
you so: On the first day after taking the small and pleasant dose, you
would feel no particular influence beyond a most harmonious sensation of
indescribable and irresistible joy; on the second day you would be so
astonishingly better that you would think yourself changed into somebody
else; on the third day you would be entirely free from disorder, whatever
its nature and however long you had had it, and would seek out the
Physician's Daughter to throw yourself at her feet, kiss the hem of her
garment, and buy as many more of the small and pleasant doses as by the
sale of all your few effects you could obtain; but she would be
inaccessible,--gone for herbs to the Pyramids of Egypt,--and you would be
(though cured) reduced to despair! Thus would the Physician's Daughter
drive her trade (and briskly too), and thus would the buying and selling