hour would be better. You need not be afraid the poison will be absorbed through the mouth, if the mucous membrane is not abraded. Cupping-glasses, if they could be applied at once, would be equally efficacious, but delays are dangerous. After suction has been applied freely, we would recommend the application of the actual cautery, or, to be plain, searing the parts deeply with a red-hot iron. This you may think is harsh, but altogether preferable to hydrophobia. If these two remedial agents are thoroughly applied, it is safe to say that there is only a bare possibility of your having hydrophobia.
It is said that in the wilds of North America, where the first remedy (suction) is in vogue, no infection has ever taken place. In Lyons, during the first twenty years of the present century, certain women (hundssangerinnen) made it their business to apply suction to the wounds made by rabid dogs. Their compensation was fixed at ten francs for the first operation and five for each succeeding one.
If the means we have mentioned are neglected and hydrophobia does occur, we do not believe that the materia medica furnishes a drug of any curative properties. The patient must die. Opium and chloroform may mitigate the symptoms, but they never save life.
The prevalent idea that if you are bitten to-day by a dog free from hydrophobia, and that he should have the disease developed years after, you are liable to be attacked by the disease, is preposterous and without foundation.
CHAP. I.
"Thank Heaven, it is done at last. No more farm drudgery for me!"
It was a warm afternoon in August. Two boys were standing in the open door-way of a large old-fashioned barn, upon a gently sloping hillside, in a quiet New Hampshire town. Close by, at the left, and connected with the barn by a long, low shed, which answered the combined purpose of granary, carriage-house and wood-shed, was a snug farm cottage, brown and weather-stained, one of the hundreds of dwellings of its class—"wood-colored," one story, with "L"—scattered over the hillsides and through the valleys of the old Granite State, from which there have gone out in the years of the past successive generations of strong-armed, brave-hearted, clear-headed young men, who have achieved success in the battle of life in varied fields of action throughout the length and breadth of the land. Who among us, who has reached middle life, cannot call to mind just such an humble farm cottage, somewhere or other in our good old State, that sheltered the youthful life of one whose name is now conspicuous in the political, professional, literary or scientific world?
To the rear of the buildings was a rocky orchard, where troops of merry boys and bright-eyed girls, from the little red school-house hard by, had played "hide-and-seek" many a summer noontime. Farther up the hill, at the end of the long green lane which flanked the orchard on the right, was a wide stretch of pasture, with a sugar orchard beyond, and thick woods, reaching far up to the summit of the hill. In front and to the right were well-tilled fields, rocky and uneven in places, to be sure, but whose strong soil produced the fair reward of faithful labor, as evidenced in the luxuriant "patches" of corn, wheat, oats and potatoes here and there to be seen. Across the valley, toward which the hill sloped to the eastward, rose a grand old
