to have come in earnest, and all the Vaubanois sprang
up awake. And now, by long, low-lying avenues
of trees, jolting in white-hooded donkey-cart, and
on donkey-back, and in tumbril and wagon, and cart
and cabriolet, and afoot with barrow and burden,—and
along the dikes and ditches and canals, in little
peak-prowed country boats,—came peasant-men
and women in flocks and crowds, bringing articles
for sale. And here you had boots and shoes,
and sweetmeats and stuffs to wear, and here (in the
cool shade of the Town-hall) you had milk and cream
and butter and cheese, and here you had fruits and
onions and carrots, and all things needful for your
soup, and here you had poultry and flowers and protesting
pigs, and here new shovels, axes, spades, and bill-hooks
for your farming work, and here huge mounds of bread,
and here your unground grain in sacks, and here your
children’s dolls, and here the cake-seller, announcing
his wares by beat and roll of drum. And hark!
fanfaronade of trumpets, and here into the Great Place,
resplendent in an open carriage, with four gorgeously-attired
servitors up behind, playing horns, drums, and cymbals,
rolled “the Daughter of a Physician” in
massive golden chains and ear-rings, and 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,