a piece of a wooden shoe, he made
them as wholesome as so many sucking-pigs.

Another did thoroughly cure folks of dropsies, tympanies, ascites, and
hyposarcides, striking them on the belly nine times with a Tenedian
hatchet, without any solution of the continuum.

Another cured all manner of fevers and agues on the spot, only with hanging
a fox-tail on the left side of the patient's girdle.

One removed the toothache only with washing thrice the root of the aching
tooth with elder-vinegar, and letting it dry half-an-hour in the sun.

Another the gout, whether hot or cold, natural or accidental, by barely
making the gouty person shut his mouth and open his eyes.

I saw another ease nine gentlemen of St. Francis's distemper ('A
consumption in the pocket, or want of money; those of St. Francis's order
must carry none about 'em.'--Motteux.) in a very short space of time,
having clapped a rope about their necks, at the end of which hung a box
with ten thousand gold crowns in't.

One with a wonderful engine threw the houses out at the windows, by which
means they were purged of all pestilential air.

Another cured all the three kinds of hectics, the tabid, atrophes, and
emaciated, without bathing, Tabian milk, dropax, alias depilatory, or other
such medicaments, only turning the consumptive for three months into monks;
and he assured me that if they did not grow fat and plump in a monastic way
of living, they never would be fattened in this world, either by nature or
by art.

I saw another surrounded with a crowd of two sorts of women. Some were
young, quaint, clever, neat, pretty, juicy, tight, brisk, buxom, proper,
kind-hearted, and as right as my leg, to any man's thinking. The rest were
old, weather-beaten, over-ridden, toothless, blear-eyed, tough, wrinkled,
shrivelled, tawny, mouldy, phthisicky, decrepit hags, beldams, and walking
carcasses. We were told that his office was to cast anew those she-pieces
of antiquity, and make them such as the pretty creatures whom we saw, who
had been made young again that day, recovering at once the beauty, shape,
size, and disposition which they enjoyed at sixteen; except their heels,
that were now much shorter than in their former youth.

This made them yet more apt to fall backwards whenever any man happened to
touch 'em, than they had been before. As for their counterparts, the old
mother-scratch-tobies, they most devoutly waited for the blessed hour when
the batch th