cal tastes which had moved
me in former years to whittle and to make a reel on which to wind
yarn, and to mend things generally. So I replied that I thought
the trade of a carpenter was the one I could most easily learn.
He approved of the idea, and expressed the intention of finding a
carpenter who would want my services; but before he did so, I was
started in a new and entirely different direction.

On her last visit to her birthplace, my mother brought back glowing
reports of a wonderful physician who lived near Moncton and effected
cures of the sick who had been given up by other doctors. I need
hardly remark that physicians of wonderful proficiency--Diomeds of
the medical profession, before whose shafts all forms of disease
had to fall--were then very generally supposed to be realities.
The point which specially commended Dr. Foshay to us was that he
practiced the botanic system of medicine, which threw mineral and all
other poisons out of the materia medica and depended upon the healing
powers of plants alone. People had seen so much of the evil effects
of calomel, this being the favorite alternative of the profession,
that they were quite ready to accept the new system. Among the
remarkable cures which had given Dr. Foshay his great reputation was
one of a young man with dyspepsia. He was reduced to a shadow, and
the regular doctors had given him up as incurable. The new doctor
took him to his home. The patient was addicted to two practices,
both of which had been condemned by his former medical advisers.
One was that of eating fat pork, which he would do at any hour of
the day or night. The new doctor allowed him to eat all he wanted.
Another was getting up in the night and practicing an ablution of
the stomach by a method too heroic to be described in anything but
a medical treatise. [1] He was now allowed to practice it to his
heart's content. The outcome of the whole proceeding was that he
was well in a few months, and, when I saw him, was as lusty a youth
as one could desire to meet.

Before Mr. Prince could see a carpenter, he was taken ill. I was
intensely interested to learn that his physician was the great doctor
I had heard of, who lived in the village of Salisbury, fifteen miles
on the road to St. John.

One of my aunts had an impression that the doctor wanted a pupil or
assistant of some kind, and suggested that a possible opening might
here be offered me. She promised to present me to