Away at the back a red glow appears from the furnace, and alembics, big and little, lie about. At night the shop is crowded with poor women buying worm-seed for their children or treacle to drive out the measles, and with country people who have come for drugs and drenches for their sick cattle. “There are serving-men waiting for their masters’ purgatives and electuaries, or the fops’ facewashes of oil of tartar, _lac virginis_, and camphor dissolved in verjuice. Smart maids are buying conserves and sackets for their mistresses, or perfumes for my lady’s chamber. Here desperadoes and rakish gallants could purchase poisons, and blushing maidens would buy their love charms and philtres, or antidotes to counteract the same. Some apothecaries kept a little room for taking tobacco, furnished with silver trays, and a maple block for cutting it, where the gallants met and gossiped, or learned tricks in smoking from fashionable professors, for nearly all the apothecaries sold tobacco—real Timidado—nicotine cane, and pudding, as it was called.” The old apothecary’s prescriptions were composed of strange ingredients, sometimes crab’s eyes and boar’s teeth, or powdered pearls, and viper broth. He would recommend you a toad, well dried in the sun, put in a bag, and hung round the neck by a string low enough to touch the region of the heart, to allay hæmorrhage. A preparation of garlic and honey smeared on the person was a certain charm against the bites of vicious dogs and reptiles, or the stings of venomous insects. Toothache could be charmed away by a few leaves of the “shepherd’s purse” placed in the sole of the shoe. An excellent recipe for sore eyes was the expressed juice of the calyx of the red honeysuckle, provided always that the flowers were gathered kneeling and repeating nine Pater nosters in honour of the Trinity, nine more “to greet our Ladye,” and a creed. My Ladye Falkenbrydge’s recipe for eye-water was much esteemed, and ran thus: “Corne-flowers gathered with their cuppes and bruyse them; macerate them in snowe or snowe water for twentye-foure houres, then dystyl in a moderate sandebath and applye it night and morning”. This was prescribed in 1553. A favourite cure for rickety children was to pass them through the split stem of a tree. For ague, a very well salted herring, split open, was applied hot to the soles of the feet; or an emerald worn round the neck formed a potent charm against the same complaint. The learned Boorde, in his _Breviary of Health_, says: “The medical treatment of the day was a mixture of religious theories, superstition, and white magic”. He recommends for a bad rheum the application of oil of scorpions and fox fat; for a bruised skin, washing it with white wine and plastering with an oak leaf; and he quaintly states “the best remedy for itching is long nails and scratching,” which, at any rate, is common-sense. To preserve the health and a good complexion, he recommends young maids to