University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.
Chowder Chow performs, as he hopes, his last cure, at the expense
of Mr. Fabius Maximus Feverage.

Fortunately, as it proved, my fears were in this
case groundless; for Mr. Feverage (which the overseer
told us was the proprietor's name,) received us
with the greatest possible respect; and upon being
told the miraculous cure we had wrought upon the
apoplectic slave, which the overseer did his best to
make still more miraculous, swore (for Mr. Feverage
though a rich and respectable man, could swear too,
and that roundly,) that he had never before heard, or
read, of there being such good doctors in the East Indies,
but that he could now believe it; asked if I cured
all diseases, like the apoplexy, instantaneously;
and upon Brown replying I never required more
than seven days to cure the most desperate diseases,
said I was “a wonderful young devil;” demanded
what were the nature of my remedies, and if I had
a good store of them; and ended by desiring to carry
me to the hospital, or sick cabins, where, he said, he
had some twenty or thirty hands down with various
diseases, which I should be handsomely rewarded for
administering to.

To this last proposal Brown, to my great relief,
demurred, saying he had travelled all day and was
tired and hungry, “because how, he was a mortal

man, and so was Chowder Chow, although a
Magi; and, split his timbers, the niggers might wait
till morning:” to which proposition Mr. Feverage
very politely submitted, and ordered supper to be
brought in.

Upon this, Captain Brown, charmed by his hospitality,
told him, that although Chowder Chow was
too weary to attend to the negroes, he would not
object to his giving him a proof of his skill in his
own person, provided he had any ailing he wished to
be rid of. Mr. Feverage, who looked to me the picture
of robust health, notwithstanding the insalubrity
of his estate, declared “he had—he did'nt know
what to call it—he could not say he was a sick man
but he believed he had, and had had ever since last
fall, when he had a bilious fever—he would not call
it a pain, or a weakness, or a stiffness, but a kind
of coldness, and yet it wasn't cold neither—but his
left leg wasn't exactly the same as his right one.”

“Well,” quoth Captain Brown, “that may be a
small matter, or a great one, which neither of us
knows nothing about; but Chowder Chow does; and
if you stands up before him, and looks him straight
in the face, he'll tell you what it is in no time.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Feverage, “I shall be glad to
know.”

And up he jumped before me; who, perceiving I
was to say something, and not knowing any thing
better to say, murmured out a modest “Holly-golly-wow.”

“How! you don't say so!” quoth Captain Brown
looking very much surprised, or pretending to be;
and immediately turning to Mr. Feverage, he assured
him, with great solemnity—that is, with one
of his choice execrations, which not even the presence
of so respectable a gentleman could check—

that it was a fortunate thing he had consulted the
wonderful Chowder Chow, who had told him that
“that coldness, or stiffness, or weakness, or whatever
he thought it, was nothing less than the beginning of
a palsy in his limb.”

“A palsy! God bless me!” cried Mr. Feverage,
looking prodigiously alarmed; “I hope not;—I never
should have believed it;—I'm not that sort of man
yet.—Yet, I remember, I had an uncle—that is, my
wife had an uncle—who died of a palsy; and such
things run in a family!”

“Oh,” said Brown, with an encouraging air, “you
needn't be frightened; for if you had all the palsies
in the world, Chowder Chow would clear them out
of you in less time than I could empty a glass of
grog, he would, split me. And if you are for making
an end of the matter, before it goes any farther
—”

“Oh yes, by all means!” interrupted Mr. Feverage,
in great agitation: “I remember that my wife's
uncle lost all the use of one side; his arm dangled,
and his leg hung, and one cheek was all out of shape,
and his mouth awry:—I would n't look so for the
world! And if the doctor can prevent it —”

“Prevent it!” quoth Brown, with an air of pity:
“if he don't, just consider me bound to make a
supper of him, that's all.”

With that, he bade the gentleman again take his
station before me, which he did, and I cursing in
my secret thoughts Brown's officiousness in procuring
a patient, when I could have done so well without
one, was obliged to pronounce the words of
wisdom; and “Sammy-ram-ram,” concluded my
part in the exhibition.

I took it for granted, that Brown would be content,
in this case, with dispensing the Holy Sand of

the Ganges, our patient and host being a man of too
much consequence and dignity to be condemned to
the infernal boluses. But Brown's audacity was
not of a kind to be subdued by the rank of a patron,
and his affection for the boluses too great to permit
the loss of any opportunity to use them. A Mermaid's
Egg, therefore, he immediately administered,
and with such effect, that, within five minutes, Mr.
Feverage grew deadly sick, and gulped and retched
in a manner doleful to behold. And to make the
matter worse, Brown, at every qualm, plied him
with questions, “how his leg felt?”—“Was not the
coldness going off?”—“Had not the weakness
diminished?”—“Was not the pain entirely gone?”
until the poor gentleman, driven to phrenzy by the
pangs of his stomach, and the impertinence of his
physician, burst into execrations, d—d his leg, the
weakness, the pain, and the coldness, and called for
a basin to prepare for that catastrophe he could no
longer doubt was coming, and which was, indeed,
not much longer deferred.

In this way, he was, at length, relieved of the
chief part of his distresses; and the remaining qualms
were conquered by a glass or two of cold toddy he
had previously ordered to be mixed; after which,
being now restored to that happy state of ease he
had been in before, he fell into a rapture, and vowed
“I was a wonderful doctor, and my medicines most
extraordinary—that they had certainly removed all
his symptoms, his coldness, weakness, &c.; and he
could take his oath upon the gospels that one leg
now felt exactly like the other.”

He now asked a great many questions concerning
me, which Brown answered by the story he had, by
constant repetition, almost commited to memory, viz.
that he had bought me of an Indian king for ten

half-joes, two hunks of tobacco, and a jack knife,
&c. &c.; all which Mr. Feverage heard with interest
and admiration, especially the fact of my being a
slave. He declared he would swap any ten of his
hands for such a paragon, and offered to buy me on
the spot, if my master would put any thing like a
reasonable price on me. But Captain Brown swore,
with affectionate emphasis, “he would not part with
me for the world, because how, split him, he was
not going to sell the bread out of his mouth.”

By this time, the supper was laid, and a sumptuous
one it was too; and down sat the hospitable host,
having previously directed Captain Brown to do the
same.

As for me, who had with longing eyes and dissolving
lips, surveyed the dishes as they were brought
in one after the other, and so far forgot myself as to
anticipate the pleasure I should have in making away
with them, I received a sudden hint that I was not
expected to be of the party, by Mr. Feverage bidding
one of the negro footmen, of whom there were some
half a dozen or more that came into the room to wait
on the table, to “take the doctor to the kitchen, and
give him his supper;” an order, however, that he
immediately revoked by saying—“But,after all, he's
no common blackey, or company for blackeys: and
so take him to the housekeeper's pantry, and there
feed him like a white-man.”

Alas! how my cheeks reddened beneath their
brown covering at my unworthy fate! how my blood
boiled to think that Captain Brown, a vulgar ignoramus
and desperado, should sit down to a gentleman's
table, from which I was driven to the half
menial feast of a housekeeper's pantry! Alas, alas!
—However, I was too hungry to remain long in a
passion.

My sable attendant, by whom I was taken to the
pantry, assisted by her highness the housekeeper, in
whom I expected to discover a respectable matron of
my own hue, but found only an old mulatto wench,
supplied me with abundance of cold victuals; to
which was, by and by, added a dish or two that had
been removed from the parlour table, after serving
the turn of my honoured master. I sighed as I fell
foul of them; “But never mind,” quoth I to myself;
“this is the last time the vile Captain Brown shall
have such an advantage over me. To-morrow, I cast
off the slough of a slave, and resume the character of
a gentleman.” This thought comforted me, and I
made, doubtless, as hearty a meal as Captain Brown
himself did.

My supper finished, I had some hope of being
conducted again to the parlour, where Captain Brown
was enjoying himself over the good cheer of Mr.
Feverage, and telling him, no doubt, a great many
unconscionable stories; but in this I was disappointed,
being left—not to myself, for every minute there
came, at least, one blackamoor visage to the door to
survey the great Magus with looks of superstitious
wonder and fear—but to enjoy my own company in
the pantry for a couple of hours or more. At the
end of this time, there came a blackey, who made
me many signs, which I could not understand, until
he expressed his wishes in an ejaculation of perplexity—“Guy
now! he no talk me, and I no talk him!
How I make dis Injie niggah go up de garret to
bed?”

I liked not the epithet “Injie niggah,” but I made
the Ethiopian happy by understanding his gestures,
and following him up the stairs of the spacious mansion
(for a spacious one it was, and I wondered to
see it occupied only by Mr. Feverage and his domestics,)

to a doleful little garret, where the servant
showed me a blanket stretched upon the floor, and
signified that there lay my bed. This done, he
marched away, carrying the light with him, as if
that were a superfluous luxury for one of my condition,
and I got into bed in the dark. And here,
notwithstanding the mortification I felt, I presently
fell sound asleep, and did not awake until rather a
late hour in the morning.