Somebody's Luggage eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 53 pages of information about Somebody's Luggage.
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Somebody's Luggage eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 53 pages of information about Somebody's Luggage.
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,
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Somebody's Luggage from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.