latter he holds up and displays, turning it about occasionally in an admiring manner.  He is discoursing, all the time, in the most voluble Italian.  He has an ointment, wonderfully efficacious for rheumatism and every sort of bruise:  he pulls up his sleeve, and anoints his arm with it, binding it up with a strip of paper; for the simplest operation must be explained to these grown children.  He also pulls teeth, with an ease and expedition hitherto unknown, and is in no want of patients among this open-mouthed crowd.  One sufferer after another climbs up into the wagon, and goes through the operation in the public gaze.  A stolid, good-natured hind mounts the seat.  The dentist examines his mouth, and finds the offending tooth.  He then turns to the crowd and explains the case.  He takes a little instrument that is neither forceps nor turnkey, stands upon the seat, seizes the man’s nose, and jerks his head round between his knees, pulling his mouth open (there is nothing that opens the mouth quicker than a sharp upward jerk of the nose) with a rude jollity that sets the spectators in a roar.  Down he goes into the cavern, and digs away for a quarter of a minute, the man the while as immovable as a stone image, when he holds up the bloody tooth.  The patient still persists in sitting with his mouth stretched open to its widest limit, waiting for the operation to begin, and will only close the orifice when he is well shaken and shown the tooth.  The dentist gives him some yellow liquid to hold in his mouth, which the man insists on swallowing, wets a handkerchief and washes his face, roughly rubbing his nose the wrong way, and lets him go.  Every step of the process is eagerly watched by the delighted spectators.

He is succeeded by a woman, who is put through the same heroic treatment, and exhibits like fortitude.  And so they come; and the dentist after every operation waves the extracted trophy high in air, and jubilates as if he had won another victory, pointing to the stone statue yonder, and reminding them that this is the glorious day of St. Antonino.  But this is not all that this man of science does.  He has the genuine elixir d’amour, love-philters and powders which never fail in their effects.  I see the bashful girls and the sheepish swains come slyly up to the side of the wagon, and exchange their hard-earned francs for the hopeful preparation.  O my brown beauty, with those soft eyes and cheeks of smothered fire, you have no need of that red philter!  What a simple, childlike folk!  The shrewd fellow in the wagon is one of a race as old as Thebes and as new as Porkopolis; his brazen face is older than the invention of bronze, but I think he never had to do with a more credulous crowd than this.  The very cunning in the face of the peasants is that of the fox; it is a sort of instinct, and not an intelligent suspicion.