Historical fiction, American; New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
Your pardon, good people! I must interrupt my stream of eloquence and
spout forth a stream of water to replenish the trough for this teamster
and his two yoke of oxen, who have come from Topsfield, or somewhere
along that way. No part of my business is pleasanter than the watering
of cattle. Look! how rapidly they lower the water-mark on the sides of
the trough, till their capacious stomachs are moistened with a gallon
or two apiece and they can afford time to breathe it in with sighs of
calm enjoyment. Now they roll their quiet eyes around the brim of their
monstrous drinking-vessel. An ox is your true toper.
But I perceive, my dear auditors, that you are impatient for the
remainder of my discourse. Impute it, I beseech you, to no defect of
modesty if I insist a little longer on so fruitful a topic as my own
multifarious merits. It is altogether for your good. The better you
think of me, the better men and women you will find yourselves. I shall
say nothing of my all-important aid on washing-days, though on that
account alone I might call myself the household god of a hundred
families. Far be it from me, also, to hint, my respectable friends, at
the show of dirty faces which you would present without my pains to
keep you clean. Nor will I remind you how often, when the midnight
bells make you tremble for your combustible town, you have fled to the
town-pump and found me always at my post firm amid the confusion and
ready to drain my vital current in your behalf. Neither is it worth
while to lay much stress on my claims to a medical diploma as the
physician whose simple rule of practice is preferable to all the
nauseous lore which has found men sick, or left them so, since the days
of Hippocrates. Let us take a broader view of my beneficial influence
on mankind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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