By this time the feelings of the farmer are wound up to the highest pitch. He already feels himself getting ill, and he can feel the grip of the disease fastening upon him by slow degrees. He has become so hysterical that he is ready to believe anything that this scamp says. "Doctor," he cries out, "I quite believe what you say about my going to be ill, for I feel the disease you have spoken of has already begun to work upon me. Have you the medicine you just now spoke of as essential in my case? If you have, I need not apply to any one else. Why delay? Let me have it at once, so that I may take it and be relieved from the terrible feeling that oppresses me now." The quack's eyes gleam with delight as he realizes that his little financial scheme has succeeded so well. "I certainly have the medicine," he said, "and I can give you a dose at once that will give you instant relief," and, taking up a folded paper that contained some white powder, he pours a few grains upon the man's extended tongue, and tells him to swallow it. Pausing for a short time after it had disappeared with a gulp down the man's throat, he asks him how he feels. "Very much better," he replies; "in fact I feel cured, for the distressing sensation that I had has almost entirely disappeared." A fee is paid by the farmer that makes the quack's heart leap for joy, whilst the farmer, with elastic steps and a radiant face, starts off for his home, to tell how he has been saved just in time from a calamity that might have imperilled his life. The strolling doctor's profession, which is the last resort of the dissipated Bohemian literary man, is in some respects a picturesque and amusing method of getting a living. A book could be well written on this one subject alone, and if it were composed by one who could enter heartily into the spirit of the thing, it would be a most entertaining and amusing one. There is no doubt but that one would get from it a most realistic picture of the common life of the Chinese such as has never yet been written. The humorous and the grotesque would abound in it, and tragedy and comedy would follow each other in rapid succession as the experiences of these flotsam and jetsam of human society were recorded in it. Men write ponderous tomes upon China that generally are insufferably dry, and that give the West an idea that the Chinaman is an absurd, bizarre kind of individual, and that the main features about him are a pigtail and a pair of chopsticks. The fact of the matter is, he is brimful of wit and humour, and is just packed with as much human nature as one would meet with in any other part of the world. If the Chinese could only jump to the idea of having a Punch of their own it would be so filled with jokes and witticisms, though Oriental ones, that not even the famous English weekly would be able to surpass it for true wit and humour.