My time passed pleasantly enough at Guelph, for I had plenty of work to do, and in all labour there is profit.  And what could be better for a healthy, active young man than the employment of assisting in settling a new country?

The only drawback to my comfort was the temporary loss of the society of my wife; a pretty, sensible young woman, whose mental and personal charms had, since my union with her, formed the happiness of my life.  We cannot, however, have every blessing at once, and I worked on cheerfully in the hope of getting things comfortably round me for my dear girl against the moment when she would join me.

Besides the services rendered to the Company, I performed con amore some gratuitous ones for the benefit of the township of Guelph, which will, doubtless, both surprise and astonish my readers.  We had no medical man in Guelph for some months after my arrival, so, for want of a better, I was obliged to turn physician and surgeon, and soon became very skilful in bleeding and tooth-drawing, and, as I charged nothing, you may be sure I had plenty of customers.  And so well pleased was Dr. Dunlop with my proficiency, that he invariably sent all his patients to me.

I remember one time in particular, he came over to my office and inquired for me, when, on the store-porter telling him I had just gone out, he said,

“Tell him when he comes back, to take the calomel and jalap down to my house, and treat those Paisley bodies with a dose apiece.”

“What! all of them, sir?”

“Yes, to be sure; they are but just arrived, and have got as fat as pigs on the voyage.  Some of their bacon must be taken off, or with this heat we shall have them all sick on our hands.  And tell him not to spare the jalap.”

When I returned and heard the message, I literally obeyed his order by administering forty-two doses of various strengths to the men, women and children, designated by the Doctor as the “Paisley bodies.”

This wholesale way of medical treatment was in this instance attended with a good effect; for there did not occur a single case of sickness amongst them during the summer.

Shortly after this, a medical man, a Mr. W-----, applied for a town-lot
and commenced practice.  This gentleman was certainly a great oddity.  He
never had but two patients that I ever heard of, and they both died. 
The settlers used to call him the “mad doctor,” and I believe not
without good reason.  He built a log-house without any door, his mode of
entrance being through a square hole he had cut out of the end of the
house about six feet from the ground.

I walked over to his place one day to speak to him on some business, and found him very busy in his garden, driving into the ground a great quantity of short sticks.

I asked him “what all those sticks were for.”

“Why you see, sir, I have planted part of my garden with Indian corn, and I am putting sticks down to mark the places where I have planted them.”