V.
A performance which I enjoyed not a little was given by a quack doctor. An enormous carriage, resembling in outline an old stage-coach, but decorated with much carved moulding and thickly covered with gilt and crimson, which produced a most bizarre effect, stood in an open space. Seated on the roof was a boy, who turned a machine which emitted the only hideous noise to be heard at the fair. In the open fore-part, richly cushioned, a man stood dressed in a dazzling suit of brass armour, his glittering helmet lying in front of him, and in his hand a small bottle of clear liquid. He was of the southern type, swarthy, wonderfully fluent of speech. He assured a gaping crowd that his medicine could cure any disease from toothache to tetanus, and he invited any sufferer to step up. Immediately one did so, the boy ground out the hideous din above, and the doctor sat for a few noisy seconds while his patient told him his trouble! Then the racket was stopped with a wave of the quack's hand, and he explained for five minutes, in vivid words, the terrible nature of the patient's disease, and invited the poor wretch to pick any bottle from the stock in front of him. This done, he had to open his waistcoat and shirt—for it was a severe pain in the left side from which he suffered—and the quack in armour struck the bottom of the bottle on his knee, thus causing the cork to pop out. He now shook the bottle vigorously with his forefinger on the neck, and the fluid changed into green, brown, and finally black, whereat the simpletons around marvelled, as they were meant to do. The comic practitioner next thrust the bottle into the open shirt-front of his patient, and shook the contents of it against the victim's skin, pressing his hand for a few moments on the part. Then he asked the fellow to step down as cured, and go among the crowd "telling his experience." A dozen cases were treated in less than half an hour—people with neuralgia, sprained wrists and ankles—and always the same formula as to consultation, explanation, application! A handful of liquid applied to a man's cheek evaporated mysteriously and worked wonders. Intending patients were told that the doctor could be consulted at the hotel near by during certain hours each day, and many must have gone to him there, for the fluent humbug had every appearance of driving a prosperous practice.