to a point where she not only dipped snuff and smoked a cob pipe,
but sometimes chewed a little natural leaf. This lady, on being
called in, would brew up a large caldron of medicinal roots and
barks and sprouts and things; and then she would deluge the interior
of the sufferer with a large gourdful of this pleasing mixture at
regular intervals. It was efficacious, too. The inundated person
either got well or else he drowned from the inside. Rocking the
patient was almost as dangerous a pastime as rocking the boat.
This also helps to explain, I think, why so many of our forebears
had floating kidneys. There was nothing else for a kidney to do.

By the time I attained to long trousers, people in our town mainly
had outgrown the unlicensed expert and were depending more and
more upon the old-fashioned family doctor--the one with the
whisker-jungle--who drove about in a gig, accompanied by a haunting
aroma of iodoform and carrying his calomel with him in bulk.

He probably owned a secret calomel mine of his own. He must have;
otherwise he could never have afforded to be so generous with it.
He also had other medicines with him, all of them being selected
on the principle that unless a drug tasted like the very dickens
it couldn't possibly do you any good. At all hours of the day and
night he was to be seen going to and fro, distributing nuggets
from his private lode. He went to bed with his trousers and his
hat on, I think, and there was a general belief that his old mare
slept between the shafts of the gig, with the bridle shoved up on
her forehead.

It has been only a few years since the oldtime general practitioner
was everywhere. Just look round and see now how the system has