Now Aunt Sonora practised upon this theory, and the excellent old lady administered a cart-load of boneset every season—blows to elevate the bile, and the leaf as a tonic. However erroneous her theory might have been, I am bound to say that her practice was about as successful as that of the regular physician.
Mr. Beagle declared "that the ager was in the blood, and the patient must first get rid of all his bad blood, and then the ager would go along with it." Swipes said "it was all in the stomach." Dobbs said "the billerous duck chok'd up with the mash fogs, and the secretions went every which way, and the liver got as hard as sole-leather, and the patient becom' sick, and the ager set in, and then the fever, and the hull system got-er goin' wrong, and if it warn't stopped, natur'd give out, and the man would die." Teazle said "it com'd from the plough'd earth, and got inter the air, and jist so long as folks breath'd agery air, jist so long they'd have the ager." Turtle said "the whole tribe on 'em, men-doctors and women-doctors, were blockheads, and the surest way to get rid of the ager, was to let it run, and when it had run itself out, it would stop, and not 'afore."
Here, then, was Puddleford at the mercy of a dozen theories, and yet men and women recovered, when the season had run its course, and were tolerably sure of health, until another year brought around another instalment of miasma.
How many crops of men have been swept off by the malaria of every new western country, I will not attempt to calculate! How many, few persons have ever attempted! This item very seldom goes into the cost of colonization. Pioneers are martyrs in a sublime sense, and it is over their bones that school-houses, churches, colleges, learning, and refinement are finally planted. But the death of a pioneer is a matter of no moment in our country—it is almost as trifling a thing as the death of a soldier in an Indian fight. There is no glory to be won on any such field. One generation rides over another, like waves over waves, and "no such miserable interrogatory," as Where has it gone? or How did it go? is put; but What did it do?—What has it left behind?
Any one who has long been a resident in the West, must have noticed the operation of climate upon the constitution. The man from the New England mountains, with sinews of steel, soon finds himself flagging amid western miasma, and a kind of stupidity creeps over him, that it is impossible to shake off. The system grows torpid, the energies die, indifference takes possession, and thus he vegetates—he does not live.
And, dear reader, it does not lighten the gloom of the picture to find Dobbs, and Teazle, and Short, quarrelling over the remains of some departed one, endeavoring to delude the public into something themselves have no conception of, about the manner in which he or she went out of the world. Not that all the physicians are Dobbses or Teazles, but these sketches are written away out on the rim of society, the rim of western society, where the townships are not yet all organized, and a sacred regard to truth compels me to record facts as they exist.
CHAPTER XIV.
Uncommonly Common Schools.—Annual School District Meeting.—Accounts for Contingent Expenses.—Turtle and Old Gulick's Boy.—"That are Glass."—The Colonel starts the Wheels again.—Bulliphant's Tactics.—Have we hired "Deacon Fluett's Darter," or not?—Isabel Strickett.—Bunker Hill and Turkey.—Sah-Jane Beagles.—The Question settled.