When there came a resounding knock at the tradesman's entrance of
the moated grange, the lord of the manor, looking over the portcullis
and seeing a lusty wight standing down below, in a leather apron,
with his sleeves rolled up and a kit of soldering tools under his
arm, didn't know until he made inquiry whether the gentle stranger
had come to mend the drain or remove the cook's leg.

A little later along, when gunpowder had come into general use as
a humanizing factor of civilization, surgeons treated a gunshot
wound by pouring boiling lard into it, which I would say was
calculated to take the victim's mind off his wound and give him
something else to think about--for the time being, anyhow. I
assume the notion of applying a mustard plaster outside one's
stomach when one has a pain inside one's stomach is based on the
same principle.

However, one doesn't have to go clear back to medieval times to
note the radical differences in the plan of treating human ailments.
A great many persons who are still living can remember when the
doctors were not nearly so numerous as they are now. I, for one,
would be the last to reverse the sentence and say that because the
doctors were not nearly so numerous then as they are now, those
persons are still living so numerously.

In the spring of the year, when the sap flowed and the birds mated,
the sturdy farmer felt that he was due to have something the matter
with him, too. So he would ride into the country-seat and get an
almanac. Doubtless the reader, if country raised, has seen copies
of this popular work. On the outside cover, which was dark blue