University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.
Containing Robin Day's first essay as a quack doctor, and the
wonderful effects of the Magian medicines.

“Now,” quoth Captain Brown, with one of his
customary expletives, “remember to hold your
tongue, and to know nothing, except when I talks
to you in the East-Injun tongue, or, what's the
same thing, any nonsensical gibberish that may pass
for it; and then out with the Holly-golly-wow, or
Sammy-ram-ram; and, my skillagalee, you'll see
what will be the end of it.”

With these words, he rode boldly up to the taverndoor,
I following, with what face I could, at his
heels.

For a moment no one noticed me; all were occupied
with Captain Brown, of whom they eagerly
asked the news from Norfolk—whether the British
had attacked and taken it? whether they had murdered
every body, and burned the houses? whether
they were on the march into the interior, and might
be soon expected in their town? with similar questions
expressive of their anxieties and fears.

To these Captain Brown made answer, by invoking
the usual benediction on his eyes, and begging
the gentleman to know “he had more important
business in the world than to concern himself about
the doings of sodgers and milishymen, because why,

their business was to knock one another on the
head, while his was to relieve the distresses of mankind.”
“However,” quoth he benevolently, “as I
see you are curious on the subject, I may as well
inform you, that the milishymen have, this time,
won the victory, saved Norfolk, licked the enemy,
and driven them clear out of the land.”

At this, there was a great rejoicing among the
villagers, who gave three cheers for “Old Vawginnce
and Uncle Sam,” followed by a tremendous shaking
of hands, each of the happy republicans crossing
palms with the bearer of good news, and insisting
upon treating him to something to drink; while
even mine host, who was a vinegar-faced man, with
a hole in his hat, awoke to love and munificence,
and swore, “stranger should have meat, drink, and
lodging for himself, and his hoss into the bawgain,
and he would n't take one fo'pence ha'penny for it,
or his name war n't John Turnpenny.”

So into the bar-room, nothing loth, went Captain
Brown to enjoy the reward of his happy tidings;
and I, having received no hint to the contrary, followed
also into the room; where my presence attracted
the regards and excited the surprise, of one of the
party, who horrified me by demanding of Captain
Brown—“I say, stranger, by Jehoshaphat, what
kind of niggur do you call that? and where did you
come by him?”

“Oh,” said Captain Brown, with gravity, after
despatching the first glass of the juice of the maize
put into his hand, and extending his hand for another,
“he an't exactly a niggur, hang me, but a blacky of
the East Injun breed, and such a piece of man's flesh
as, I reckon, was never seen before in these parts,
and will never be seen again. You've heard tell
of the Magi breed?—them great wise fellers in the

Injies, that knows all things—can eat fire, chaw
swords, find money, read the stars, raise the devil,
cure the consumption, and draw rum out of a beer-barrel—Well,
shiver my timbers, he's a Magi!”

“Lord bless us, you don't say so!” quoth the
landlord, eyeing me, as all the rest now did, with
wonder and admiration—“draw rum out of a beer-barrel?
raise the devil! How did you come by him?”

“Bought him, if you must know, my hearty,”
said Captain Brown, “of the King of the Injies, for
ten half-joes, two hunks of tobacco, and a jack-knife;
and then had to kidnap him away; for these Magi
fellers, d'ye see, ain't to be had every day, and the
king he rued his bargain.”

“Draw rum out of a beer-barrel!” again ejaculated
mine host, to whom this faculty appeared most surprising
and enviable: “perhaps he can draw good
French brandy out of a cider cask, hah? I say, boy,
hah! can you do that?” he added addressing himself
to me; who, astounded and indignant at being
mistaken for a scion of the Ethiopian race, and petrified
at the impudence and audacity of my comrade,
was now afraid that the attention he had drawn upon
me, and the incredible account he gave of my qualities,
might eventuate in suspicion and danger. But
Captain Brown stepped immediately to the rescue—
that is as soon as he had despatched a second glass of
liquor.

“Harkee, shipmate,” said he to Mr. John Turnpenny;
“you might as well preach a Dutch Sermon
to a ship's fiddlehead as ask any of your palavering
questions of that young whelp of a Magi; because
how, he don't understand English. And as for
drawing rum out of a beer barrel, raising the devil,
and so on, why, I will just take the liberty to inform
yon, d'ye see, he don't do no such tricks; because

how, I bought him young, before he had finished
that part of his education. No; in all them things,
he is no better nor wiser than any other jackanapes.
But what I bought him for was for the good of
human natur', whereof he knows things enough to
make your hair stand on end. Look at him! There's
the boy—Chowder-Chow they called him in the
Injies—who is the seventh son of his father, which
was the seventh son of his grandfather, and the
greatest doctor in all the Injies, and cured the king's
wife of the cholery, after she had been lying dead
three days in her coffin; and Chowder-Chow here,
for all of his being so young and looking so like a
jackass, is just as great a cure as his father.”

“Can he cure the aguy?” cried an indigo coloured
personage, who, with his hands buried in his trowsers
pockets, his head sunk on his breast, and, otherwise,
looking very chilly and disconsolate, now
stared me with solemn eagerness, and a doleful
yawn, in the face.

“Can he cure the aguy?” repeated Captain Brown
with disdain; “aguy and the bilious cholery, and the
small-pox, consumption, happyplexy, sore eyes and
stitch in the side, lockjaw and the falling-sickness,
liver complaint and the horrors, rheumatiz, toothache,
and water in the brain—every unfortunate
disease you ever heard of; besides all the ills of horses,
cows, sheep, dogs, asses, pigs, and niggurs—what is
he the seventh son of a seventh son, which was an
Injun Magi, for, if he can't cure the whole of 'em,
just as easy as look at 'em?”

“Because,” said the blue-visaged man, his visage
growing still bluer, “I have a touch of the complaint,
which has been hanging about me, on and off, I
reckon now for about seven years; and, I fancy, I
about am having a shake of it, right off now; because

my nose is as cold as a dog's, and it is coming on to
the time, which is about early candle-light. And if
so be as how this Injun doctor can cure me, why
I'll pay him for his trouble, that's all.

And to prove that the poor fellow was not mistaken
in his reckoning, his speech was ended by a
sudden snap of the teeth, that was followed by
another, and another, until presently there was such
a chattering and clattering among his jaws, as might
have moved an alligator to surprise and envy.

“Can he cure a weakness in the small of the back,
with a pain in the inwards?” quoth the landlord
Turnpenny. “Can he cure a misery in the tooth?”
demanded another. “Can he do any thing at a weak
stomach, and the hopthalmy in the eyes?” cried a
third; and presently there was not a man of them
that was not busy recounting his bodily infirmities,
and inquiring my abilities to remove them.

Captain Brown was not satisfied with replying
boldly in the affirmative: he assured them my powers
were so wonderfully great that I could remove half
the diseases of the world merely by looking at them;
and, for the other half, I required only two remedies,
each of such peculiar, yet incompatible virtues,
that, although, either was a perfect specific for all
the diseases to which it was applicable, it was certain
death, if administered to the maladies requiring the
use of the other.

“And,” said he, with a great oath, “here's the
wonder of the thing; for, whereas you might think
that with two such drugs, you, or I, or any body
else, might go into the world and spoil the regular
doctors' business, you would think, axing your pardon
for saying so, like so many jackasses; because
how, we should never know which of them to give,
and if we gave the wrong one, we should send your

sick man to Davy Jones in no time: no I'll be
hang'd, none but a magi knows that. Now,”
said he, turning to the shivering subject of ague, and
producing his wondrous medicines—viz., the tobacco
boluses and the paper of sand; “here I have
the great cure-alls, split me, the holy medicines of
the Magies, one in one hand and t'other in the t'other;
and I knows one of them will cure you, d'ye see,
the other kill you; and that's all I knows, or you
knows, or any body else knows; and if you want to
try your own luck at 'em, here's at your sarvice—
you may have a trial all for nothing:—I allows all
people to do that, for the good of human natur'.
But,” he added, “if you axes the Magi to tell you
the true one that will cure you, why, then, here's
the case, shiver me, all in short—out with your
rhino; for that's not a thing to be done free gratis for
nothing.”

Fever-and-ague recoiled from the perilous choice,
so charitably offered him, and fell to fumbling, as
well as the “shakes” would permit, in his pocket for
the means of engaging the services of the young
Magi; while the others, gazing with reverent curiosity
on the magical drugs, begged to know “their
names and natur's, if it was axing a fair question.”

“Fair enough,” quoth Captain Brown, with conscious
dignity; “I am not one of them ignoramus
quacks that makes a secret of their kill-dog stuffs,
which does no good, except to kill off jackasses,
whereof there is too many in the world: because as
how, if they tell the secret, any body may lay hold
of the same nonsensical trash, and set up a-quacking
in opposition. But there is no fear of that with me;
because as how, if any body gits the medicines, he
can't use 'em, d'ye see, without a Magi to help him;
and, secondly, he can't get them, without he sails all

the way to the Injies, and then buys them of the
Magies. These here,” quoth he, extending a handful
of boluses, “is them rare and precious things,
Mermaids' Eggs, fished up by the pearl divers from
the pearl banks of the Injun Ocean.”

“Lord bless us!” quoth Mr. Turnpenny; “do
mermaids lay eggs? I thought they war half fish and
half woman!”

“And so they are,” quoth Captain Brown; “but
they lays eggs notwithstanding. I harpooned one,
off the coast of Coromandel; and I'll be hang'd if
she wasn't as full of eggs as a tortoise; and, split
me for a ninny, (because as how, I didn't then know
of their virtues,) I had 'em all cooked in a mess, and
the sailors eat 'em for dinner; but the carcass we
threw overboard, because as how, it was too human
looking for eating.”

Here Captain Brown had very nearly forgotten
himself, as was proved by one of the men present
asking “what were the medical effects of this extraordinary
dinner upon his crew?” to which, however,
he immediately replied, that the effects were,
in the main, bad enough, as they killed twenty seven
men, out of thirty that eat of them; though they
cured him of a terrible Bengal fever, that then possessed
him, and that so thoroughly that he had never
been sick since, and never again expected to be—
“because how, it was the virtue of these Magi medicines,
that, when they cured a man of any disease,
no matter what it might be, he was never sick afterwards
of any malady whatever, and always died of
mere old age.”

“And this here stuff that's in the paper,” quoth
Captain Brown, displaying the second treasure—

“Lord bless us,” said Mr. Turnpenny, “it looks
for all the world like common sand!”

“And so it is,” said the voyager, “but such sand
as you, nor any other man, never before saw in
America. It is that wonderful sand, more precious
than gold or silver, the Holy Sand of the Ganges.”

“Lord bless us!” ejaculated Mr. Turnpenny.

“It comes from the holy places in the mountains,
where the river comes out of a rock, and where none
but the Magies goes,” said Captain Brown; “and it
has such a wonderful power, that if you throw one
single grain of it into a pine-wood fire, it will blow
the house up; and where you give it in the wrong
cases, and the man swallows it, he falls to pieces like
an unhooped hogshead. And to tell you the honest
truth, d'ye see,” he added, “it is not safe to swallow
it in any case: the true way to take it is to put it
into a bottle of water and shake it, and then smell at
the bottle when you get up in the morning, seven
days fasting.”

By this time, fever-and-ague had collected all
the small coin in his pocket, which he proposed to
exchange for a dose of the wondrous physic, provided
the Magi Chowder Chow should select it, and
provided also Chowder Chow's master should warrant
him against all danger, and guarantee a perfect
cure into the bargain. Captain Brown deposited
the money in his pocket, after swearing that he had
never before taken so small a sum for such valuable
physic, no, not he; but that “something was better
than nothing, split him, and he would go a great
way for the good of human natur';” and then bade
them observe in how wonderful a manner Chowder
Chow would proceed in deciding upon his case, and
its proper specific.

“You see him, there he stands,” quoth the villain,
“and knows no more of our lingo than I do of a cat's
conscience or a monkey's mathematics. Well now,

mayhap, you may think he will have to ask a whole
heap of questions, and I to answer them, in his
lingo, for this here gentleman that is a shaking like
a shutter in a high wind, as to the state of his inwards,
and all that, like a common physicianer;
which is all nonsense, d'ye see; because why, a Magi
looks into a man's face, and sees through him, and
knows all about him, inside aud out; and where
then's the use of asking questions? I shall just put
the poor devil—which is to say, begging his pardon,
the poor gentleman—before his eyes, and you'll see
what will come of it.”

With that, he took the shiverer by the shoulder,
and placed him before me, saying, “Well now, Chowder
Chow, my hearty, what do you think of the poor
man, and what is to be done with him?”

Chowder Chow, in spite of the reluctance he felt
at being made a party to a fraud so impudent and yet
so ridiculous, felt, nevertheless, the necessity of acting
up to the character he had assumed; and, taking
the hint from the words of his master, of which he
was supposed to understand not a syllable, and from
instructions previously given, he stared in the man's
face, with as much courage as he could muster, backed
by a suitable proportion of solemnity, and “Holly-golly-wow!”
he muttered.

“Ah, indeed!” quoth Captain Brown, turning with
admiration to the expectant company—“there you
see the use of having a Magi: for shiver me, if I
didn't think, from my own numskull notions, that
the Holy Sand of the Ganges was the very thing
to cure the gentleman of his aguy; whereas Chowder
Chow says, says he, `The man has got the fever-and-aguy,
and has had it for seven years, and it has
turned his liver into milk and molasses:—give him

a Mermaid's egg, and wash it down with half a pint
of whiskey.”'

“Lord bless us!” said the landlord; and “By
Jehoshaphat!” said the others, expressing their wonder
and admiration. One of them, however, looked
a little perplexed, and repeating the word—“Holly-golly-wow,”
asked how it was possible it could express
so much as honest Brown had rendered as its
meaning. To this, Brown replied “the Magi lingo
was a short-hand language, which crammed a barrel
of notions into a pint of words, and was extremely
difficult to learn, it was, split him.” Then, having
thus ingeniously satisfied the doubter, he made the
sick man, to my horror, swallow one of the hugest of
the boluses, and immediately after wash it down with
an immoderate glass of whiskey.

He then turned to mine host Turnpenny, who was
eager upon Brown's offering, “out of respect to the
house,” as he said, to physic him for nothing, to have
the great Magi at work upon his weakness in the
small of the back, and pain of the inwards; and
Brown having brought him before me accordingly, I
was about to deliver another oraculous opinion; when
the bolus we had administered to the ague-patient,
being, I suppose, at length dissolved by the whiskey,
produced such a sudden and tremendous effect upon
his inwards, as to discompose the company, and interrupt
my Magian proceedings. The poor man
turned from blue to pale, gave a hideous gasp, clapped
his hands upon his epigastrium, arching his back
up, like a frenzied cat; and then, with a yell of astonishment
and distress, he rushed from the room
into the porch, where his rebellious digester discarded
the Magian medicine; but not without such throes
of anguish and convulsions of nausea, as left the poor

fellow, when the operation ceased, more dead than
alive.

I was very much frightened, when they brought
him in; and so, indeed, was every body else, except
Brown; who grinned, declared all was right, and
ended the scene by ordering them to give him another
glass of whiskey, and carry him to bed; which
was immediately done.

This calamitous termination of the first miracle of
Chowder Chow, the Magus, (or Magi, as Captain
Brown would have it,) cast a discredit, at least for a
time, over the Mermaid's Eggs; and the company
no longer showed an inclination to be physicked.
Even Turnpenny, upon being appealed to, to resume
his station before the dispenser of panaceas, excused
himself, giving as a reason, that supper was now
ready, and he could not think of losing so great a
luxury; which, it was evident, he must do, if the
Magian medicines produced so strong an effect upon
him as they had done on his aguish neighbour.

The word supper was music to my ears, and quite
banished the fears I had felt as to the ulterior effects
of the bolus; and while despatching it, which I was
obliged to do at a side table, (for, as a slave, which
my audacious friend had represented me to be, no
one thought me a suitable companion at the table;
while my Magian character fortunately preserved
me from the ignominy of the kitchen,) I was resolved
to bear the ills and degradation of my present
state, as long as circumstances made it necessary,
with as much resignation and philosophy as I could.