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 all impossible. For there was always a good supply of two drugs in the place—Turkey rhubarb and sulphuric acid; both very useful, both very cheap, and both going very far in varied preparation, properly handled. An ounce or two of sulphuric acid, for instance, costing something fractional, dilutes with water into many gallons of physic. Excellent medicines they made, too, and balanced each other remarkably well by reason of their opposite effects. But indeed they were not all, for sometimes there were other two or three drugs in hand, interfering, perhaps troublesomely, with the simple division of therapeutics into the two provinces of rhubarb and sulphuric acid.

Business was brisk at the dispensary: several were waiting, and medicine and advice were going at the rate of two minutes for sixpence. Looey's case was not so clear as most of the others; she could not describe its symptoms succinctly, as