Part 58

“Sometimes magnifying lenses. Mostly just plain window glass. Few children escaped him, for he would tell the parents that only prompt action could avert blindness.”

“At least the plain glass couldn’t hurt the children,” suggested Mrs. Clyde.

“Couldn’t it! It couldn’t fail to hurt them. Modify the sight of a delicate instrument like a child’s eye continuously by the most transparent of barriers, and it is bound to go wrong soon. The magnifying glasses are far worse. There are hundreds of children in that one locality alone who will carry the stigma of his quackery throughout their lives.”

“Do you think he is here with a view to practicing his amiable trade?” inquired Clyde.

“Only in part, if at all. I understand that he has changed his line.”

“How comes he by all that showy money, then?”

“By murder.”

The Clydes, accustomed to their physician’s hammerstroke turns of speech, took this under consideration.

“But he wasn’t committing murder in the church just now, I suppose,” insinuated Mrs. Clyde at length.

“Not directly. His immediate business there, I suspect, was bribery.”

“Of whom?”

“The minister.”

“Oh, come, Strong!” protested Mr. Clyde. “Mr. Huddleston isn’t an intellectual giant, I grant you; but he’s certainly a well-meaning and honorable old fellow.”

“Some cynical philosopher has remarked that wicked men have a talent for doing harm, but fools have a genius. Mr. Huddleston’s goodness and honesty, taken in connection with his hopeless ignorance of human nature, are just so much capital to hand for a scoundrel like this Gray.”

“What does he expect to get for his twenty-dol-lar bill?”

“First, a reputation for piety and generosity. Second, that reputation duly certified to by the leading minister of the town.”

“In other words, a testimonial.”

“Precisely. For home use, and cheap at twenty dollars. Preparatory to operating in a town, your itinerating quack bribes two people—if he can. First, the editor of the local paper; second, the pastor of the leading church. The editor usually takes the money with his eyes wide open; the minister with his eyes tight shut.”

“How can his eyes be shut to such a business?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“Because so much dust has been thrown in them by the so-called religious journals.”

“Surely you don’t mean that religious journals exploit quackery in their pages!” cried Mrs. Clyde.

“They are the mainstay of the quack and patent medicine business,” declared the Health Master. “Leaving out the Christian Science papers, which, of course, don’t touch this dirty money, the religious press of all denominations, with a few honorable individual exceptions, sells out to any form of medical fraud which has a dollar to spend. Is it strange that the judgment of some of the clergy, who implicitly trust in their sectarian publications, becomes distorted? It’s an even chance that our Great Gray faker’s advertisement is in the religious weekly which lies on Mr. Huddleston’s study-table at this moment.”

Grandma Sharpless turned around from her seat in front, where she always ensconced herself so that, as she put it, she could see what was coming in time to jump. “I know it is,” she stated quietly. “For while I was waiting in the parsonage last week I picked up the ‘Church Pillar’ and saw it there.”

“Trust Grandma Sharpless’s eyes not to miss anything that comes within their range,” said Dr. Strong.

“Well, I missed the sense of that advertisement till just now,” retorted the old lady. “I’ve just remembered about this Graham Gray.”

“What about him?” asked the Health Master with eagerness, for Mrs. Sharpless’s memory was as reliable for retaining salient facts as her vision was for discerning them. “Do you know him?”

“Only by his works. Last year a traveling doctor of that name stopped over at Greenvale, twenty miles down the river, and gave some of his lectures to Suffering Womanhood, or some such folderol. He got hold of Sally Griffin, niece of our farmer here, while she was visiting there. Sally’s as sound as a pippin, except for an occasional spell of fool-in-the-head, and I guess no school of doctoring ever helps that common ailment much. Well, this Gray got her scared out of her wits with symptoms, and sold her twenty-five dollars’ worth of medicine to cure her of something or other she didn’t have. Cured!” sniffed the lively narrator. “If I hadn’t taken the stuff away from her and locked it up, I expect she’d be in the churchyard by now.”

“The whole philosophy of quackery explicated and punctured, by one who knows,” chuckled Dr. Strong.