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288 have felt better after using the articles, and have been silly enough to suppose the medicine cured them, they may feel very grateful for the supposed disinterested favor, and be willing to sign any paper that the nostrum-maker or his agent may present.

Consumptive persons, always deluded by false hopes, are ever prone to suppose that they are benefited by any new medicine, and often think that they are nearly or quite cured by some new article. They are still, they say, a little weak, but the main disease is, they think, wholly eradicated. Always extremely grateful, such patients are anxious that the whole world should be benefited by the same means. But, alas! the ink is scarcely dry upon their signatures, before their own history shows the falsity of their certificates. The disease, of which they imagined themselves cured, has hastened to its fatal termination, and the signer of the certificate rests quietly beneath the sod, unable to contradict it. Yet the certificates themselves are not consigned, as they should be, to the graves of their authors, but are preserved and printed, and made to travel the