This is the _punctum instans_, the very nick of time, for the charlatan: in he comes, looking insufferably wise, and brim full of sympathetic indignation. All has been done wrong, of course. While he affects to be doing everything, he does exactly nothing--stirs up an invisible, impalpable, infinitessimal, incomprehensible particle, in a little water, which the patient can neither see, feel, taste, nor smell. Down it goes. The patient's faith, as to the size of it, rather resembles a cocoanut than a grain of mustard seed. His confidence in the _new_ doctor is as gigantic, and as blind, as Polyphemus, after he had been _gouged_, by him of Ithaca. He plants his galvanic grasp, upon the wrist of the little doctor, much in the manner of a drowning man, clutching at a full grown straw. He is absolutely better already. The wife and the little ones look upon the mountebank, as their preserver from widowhood and orphanage. "_Dere ish noting_," he says, "_like de leetil doshes_;" and he takes his leave, regretting, as he closes the door, that his sleeve is not large enough, to hold the sum total of his laughter. Yet some of these quacks become _honest men_; and, however surprised at the result, they are finally unable, to resist the force of the popular outcry, in their own favor. They almost forget their days of duplicity, and small things--they arrive, somehow or other, at the conclusion, that, however unexpectedly, they are great men, and their wild tactics a system. They use longer words, move into larger houses, and talk of first principles: and all the practice of a neighborhood finally falls into the hands of Dr. Ninkempaup or Dr. Pauketpeeker. Francis Joseph Borri died, in prison, in 1695. Sorbiere in his _Voiage en Angleterre_, page 158, describes him thus--"He is a cunning blade; a lusty, dark-complexioned, good-looking fellow, well dressed, and lives at considerable expense, though not at such a rate, as some suppose; for eight or ten thousand livres will go a great way at Amsterdam. But a house, worth 15,000 crowns, in a fine location, five or six footmen, a French suit of clothes, a treat or two to the ladies, the occasional refusal of fees, five or six rix dollars distributed, at the proper time and place among the poor, a spice of insolence in discourse, and sundry other artifices have made some credulous persons say, that he gave away handfulls of diamonds, that he had discovered the philosophers stone, and the universal medicine." When he was in Amsterdam, he appeared in a splendid equipage, was accosted, by the title of "_your excellence_," and they talked of marrying him to one of the greatest fortunes.