"why shouldn't it? The medicine is nat'ral yarbs, pure yarbs; yarbs must cure me."
"Because a thing is nat'ral, as you call it, you think it must be good. But who gave you that cough? Was it, or was it not, nature?"
"Sure, you don't think that natur, Dame Natur, will hurt a body, do you ?"
"Natur is good Queen Bess; but who's responsible for the cholera?"
"But yarbs, yarbs; yarbs are good?"
"What's deadly-nightshade? Yarb, ain't it?"
"Oh, that a Christian man should speak agin natur and yarbs—ugh, ugh, ugh!—ain't sick men sent out into the country; sent out to natur and grass?"
"Aye, and poets send out the sick spirit to green pastures, like lame horses turned out unshod to the turf to renew their hoofs. A sort of yarb-doctors in their way, poets have it that for sore hearts, as for sore lungs, nature is the grand cure. But who froze to death my teamster on the prairie? And who made an idiot of Peter the Wild Boy?"
"Then you don't believe in these 'ere yarb-doctors?"
"Yarb-doctors? I remember the lank yarb-doctor I saw once on a hospital-cot in Mobile. One of the faculty passing round and seeing who lay there, said with professional triumph, "Ah, Dr. Green, your yarbs don't help ye now, Dr. Green. Have to come to us and the mercury now, Dr. Green.—Natur! Y-a-r-b-s!"
"Did I hear something about herbs and herb-doctors?" here said a flute-like voice, advancing.
