England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
blue-feathered hat, shaded from the admiring sun by two immense umbrellas
of artificial roses, to dispense (from motives of philanthropy) that
small and pleasant dose which had cured so many thousands! Toothache,
earache, headache, heartache, stomach-ache, debility, nervousness, fits,
fainting, fever, ague, all equally cured by the small and pleasant dose
of the great Physician's great daughter! The process was this,--she, the
Daughter of a Physician, proprietress of the superb equipage you now
admired with its confirmatory blasts of trumpet, drum, and cymbal, told
you so: On the first day after taking the small and pleasant dose, you
would feel no particular influence beyond a most harmonious sensation of
indescribable and irresistible joy; on the second day you would be so
astonishingly better that you would think yourself changed into somebody
else; on the third day you would be entirely free from disorder, whatever
its nature and however long you had had it, and would seek out the
Physician's Daughter to throw yourself at her feet, kiss the hem of her
garment, and buy as many more of the small and pleasant doses as by the
sale of all your few effects you could obtain; but she would be
inaccessible,--gone for herbs to the Pyramids of Egypt,--and you would be
(though cured) reduced to despair! Thus would the Physician's Daughter
drive her trade (and briskly too), and thus would the buying and selling
and mingling of tongues and colours continue, until the changing
sunlight, leaving the Physician's Daughter in the shadow of high roofs,
admonished her to jolt out westward, with a departing effect of gleam and
glitter on the splendid equipage and brazen blast. And now the enchanter
struck his staff upon the stones of the Great Place once more, and down
went the booths, the sittings and standings, and vanished the
merchandise, and with it the barrows, donkeys, donkey-carts, and
tumbrils, and all other things on wheels and feet, except the slow
scavengers with unwieldy carts and meagre horses clearing up the rubbish,
assisted by the sleek town pigeons, better plumped out than on non-market
days. While there was yet an hour or two to wane before the autumn
sunset, the loiterer outside town-gate and drawbridge, and postern and
double-ditch, would see the last white-hooded cart lessening in the
avenue of lengthening shadows of trees, or the last country boat, paddled
by the last market-woman on her way home, showing black upon the
reddening, long, low, narrow dike between him and the mill; and as the
paddle-parted scum and weed closed over the boat's track, he might be
comfortably sure that its sluggish rest would be troubled no more until
next market-day.
As it was not one of the Great Place's days for getting out of bed, when
Mr. The Englishman looked down at the young soldiers practising the goose-
step there, his mind was left at liberty to take a military turn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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