“Why,” said she, with an effort that evidently cost her a struggle, “my people make and barter them at the Fort at the north-west for things of more use. Indians have no money.”
It was the first time I had heard so distinct an avowal of her American origin, and as I saw it brought the colour to her face, I thought I had discovered a clue to her natural pride, or, more properly, her sense of the injustice of the world, which is too apt to look down upon this mixed race with open or ill-concealed contempt. The scurvey opens old sores, and makes them bleed afresh, and an unfeeling fellow does the same. Whatever else I may be, I am not that man, thank fortune. Indeed, I am rather a dab at dressin’ bodily ones, and I won’t turn my back in that line, with some simples I know of, on any doctor that ever trod in shoe-leather, with all his compounds, phials, and stipties.
In a gineral way, they know just as much about their business as a donkey does of music, and yet both of them practise all day. They don’t make no improvements. They are like the birds of the air, and the beasts of the forest. Swallows build their nests year after year and generation after generation in the identical same fashion, and moose winter after winter, and century after century, always follow in each other’s tracks. They consider it safer, it ain’t so laborious, and the crust of the snow don’t hurt their shins. If a critter is such a fool as to strike out a new path for himself, the rest of the herd pass, and leave him to worry on, and he soon hears the dogs in pursuit, and is run down and done for. Medical men act in the same manner.
Brother Eldad, the doctor, used to say to me when riggin’ him on the subject:
“Sam, you are the most conceited critter I ever knew. You have picked up a few herbs and roots, that have some virtue in them, but not strength enough for us to give a place to in the pharmacopia of medicine.”
“Pharmacopia?” sais I, “why, what in natur is that? What the plague does it mean? Is it bunkum?”
“You had better not talk on the subject,” said he, “if you don’t know the tarms.”
“You might as well tell me,” sais I, “that I had better not speak English if I can’t talk gibberish. But,” sais I, “without joking, now, when you take the husk off that, and crack the nut, what do you call the kernel?”
“Why,” sais he, “it’s a dispensary; a book containin’ rules for compoundin’ medicines.”
“Well then, it’s a receipt-book, and nothin’ else, arter all. Why the plague can’t you call it so at once, instead of usin’ a word that would break the jaw of a German?”