Seven Wives and Seven Prisons

EE-AN ODD LANDLORD-A WOMAN AS BIG AS A HOGSHEAD-REDUCING THE HOGSHEAD TO A BARREL-WONDERFUL VERIFICATION OF A DREAM-

f seriously sick. Asking advice, I was directed to the house of a widow, who promised to nurse and take care of me. I was ill for two weeks, and meantime, my half-sister in Delaware County, to whom I made known

man, sent for me to come and see them. I went there and found a man who had been insane seven years, but who was quiet and well-behaved, only he was "out of his head." I engaged to do what I could for him. The father of my Newbury patient had paid me well, and with my medical practice and the sale of medicines in traveling about, I had accumulated several hundred dollars, and when I went to Montgomery I had a good horse and buggy which cost me five hundred dollars. So, when my new patient had been under my care and contr

was not well taken care of. I drove over to see about it, and after some inquiry I was told that the boy was then in school. Going to the schoolhouse and asking for him, the school-mistress, who knew me, denied that he was there, but I pushed in, and found him, and a ragged, miserable looking little wretch he was. I

bout with me on one or two occasions. One day he told me that he knew a girl just out of the place who was subject to fits, and wanted to know if I could do anything for her; that her father was rich and would pay a good price to have her cured. I went to see the girl and did at least enough to earn a fee of one hundred dollars, which her father gladly paid me. Benson also introduced me to some other people whom I found profitable patients. I thought he was a very good friend to me, but he was a cool, calculating rascal. He meant to rob me of my horse and buggy, and went deliberately to work about it. First, he issued the handbill which caused my arrest in Troy, where he knew I was going. Next, as appeare

, and good, clear, cold weather. They represented the sport to be capital, and said that plenty of superb lake trout and pickerel could be taken every day, and urged me to go with them. As I had nothing special to do for a few days, I went. When w

do you come f

ston," I

at be you

medicine, and take

, do ye ever

quite frequen

more'n twelve years; been filling' all the time till they tell me she's bigger'n a hogshead now, and she'

m the landlord to talk to my friends about our proposed sport for to-mo

nt to President Pierce, in Washington. We had agreed, the night before, to fish for him the first day, and to send him the best specimens we could from his native state. After dinner my friends started to go out on the ice again, and

that lady. She was not quite the "hogshead" the landlord declared her to be, but she was one of the worst cases of dropsy I had ever seen. I introduced myself to her, told h

in the past twelve years I have had at least forty

rst;" and as I said it I took from my vest pocke

blossom, which cannot possibly harm you, and wh

my father appeared to me and told me that a stranger would come with a blossom in his hand; that he would offer it t

g to take this stranger's medicine wit

; go and get

physician, and had carefully attended to her case as long as he lived; but that she had

your coming with a blossom in your hand, figuratively speaking, is so exactl

d her no; that I had merely come up from Boston with two fr

enty of practice in the villages and farm houses about here: at any rate,

d return to Boston, I astonished them by informing them that I should stay where I was for the present, perhaps for months, and that I believed I c

e soon became a barrel under my treatment, and in four months she was entirely cured, and was as sound as any wo

told me that he had heard of my success in dropsical cases, and that I must go to Newark, N. J., and see his daughter. "Pay," he said, "was no object; I must go." I told him that I had early finished my business in that vicinity, and that when