“It's about well. William found a mole at last and when I put the skin of it on my breast it cured it. I knowed it would, but when we wanted a mole there wasn't none to be found, so I had to go and see you about it.”
“I thought it would soon be well. Good for the mole-skin,” laughed the doctor, as they took their leave.
When they had started homeward they looked at each other, the doctor with a smile in his eyes—he had encountered this sort of thing so often in his professional life that he was quite accustomed to it. But Mary's brown eyes were serious. “John,” she said, “when will the reign of ignorance and superstition end?”
“When Time shall be no more, my dear.”
“So it seems. Those people, while lacking education, seem to be fairly intelligent and yet their lives are dominated by things like these.”
“Yes, and not only people of fair intelligence but of fair education too. While they would laugh at what we saw and heard back there they are holding fast to things equally senseless and ridiculous. Then there are thoroughly educated and cultured people holding fast to little superstitions which had their birth in ignorance away back in the past somewhere. How many people do you know who want to see the new moon over the left shoulder? And didn't I hear you commanding Jack just the other day to take the hoe right out of the house and to go out the same door he came in?”
“O, ye-es, but then nobody wants to have a hoe carried through the house, John. It's such a bad sign—”
The doctor laughed. “This thing is so widespread there seems to be no hope of eliminating it entirely though I believe physicians are doing more than anybody else toward crushing it out.”
“Can they reason and argue people out of these things?”
“Not often. Good-natured ridicule is an effective shaft and one I like to turn upon them sometimes. They get so they don't want to say those things to me, and so perhaps they get to see after a while that it is just as well not to say them too often to other people, too.”