"Have you any aches or pains, my children, in the foot or the ear? do you have bad dreams? do you suffer when you are asleep? have you been beaten? are you blind, dumb, or paralyzed? Draw near; grasp the golden opportunity! I am the great restorer, the great cure-all, the great operator! Make haste to profit by my presence in this province; I shall not come again for thirty years, and probably I shall not find you all then. Come, my friends; I cure everything, I do everything--I even make children, when they are ordered in advance. The only thing I don't do is extract teeth, but I can supply a lotion that makes them drop out, and the result is the same." Peasants are naturally credulous. On hearing this harangue, some of them approached Dubourg, and, after respectfully removing their hats or making a reverence, proceeded to tell him their ills. When the number about him was considerable, Dubourg took from his basket the mechanical syringe, which he had filled with Eau de Baréges; then he pressed the spring, and the villagers had to hold their noses; but they remained, because the syringe played the air _Avec les Jeux dans le Village_, and Dubourg said: "This magic syringe, my children, came to me from the favorite sultana of the Sultan of Egypt. It plays three hundred tunes; but, as it is subject to whims, it insists on playing the same one over and over to-day. This marvellous water that comes from it--it does not smell like rosewater, by the way--is a prompt and certain remedy for women with the colic. I sometimes administer these remedies myself, but I have to be very particular as to persons, for this syringe doesn't fit all figures." After this speech, Dubourg listened to the complaints of each one in turn, then looked through his pharmacy, and distributed drugs at random, but received the price with the utmost assurance, promising that the effects would soon appear. He gave a nurse liquid almond paste; a man with a fever, cachou pastilles; for a cold, he prescribed pellets that he had made of the salve for corns; for asthma, macassar oil; for a pain in the chest, bear's grease; and for the stomach-ache, rouge _au vinaigre_. After this promising début, he belabored Madelon and rode away as fast as possible from his patients. He was not half a league away, when the poor creatures began to feel the effects of his remedies. Some held their hands to their bellies, some were nauseated, some had a violent headache, some could not endure the taste of the drug they had swallowed, and some ran after the charlatan, calling him _swindler_ and _thief_. But he did not wait for them. Luckily, he was prudent enough to administer his remedies in very small quantities, so that the results were not serious.