Unlike many of the panaceas of the day, Doc’s fright remedy was easily compounded. There was, he told us, an infallible means to prevent being struck by lightning, and also a cure for those who have been struck; but since for the preventive he lacked the skin of a seal, we would have to take our chances during thunderstorms. There were many wart cures, he said, but the one recommended by the most enlightened doctors was to hunt for a shooting star, and then, as soon as possible after seeing one, to pour vinegar on a door-hinge, which isn’t easy to find in the depths of the woods.

The fear remedy, however, was not so difficult. Its chief ingredients, according to Doc, were gunpowder and pepper, mixed with rum, and flavored with Digby’s Sympathetic Powder. We had the gunpowder and the rum, while Doc had the Sympathetic Powder. We could, he said, get along without the pepper, and even without the gunpowder too; for it was the Sympathetic Powder and the rum that were the two necessary ingredients. The gunpowder and the pepper, he assured us, only made the remedy more lasting in its effects.

“It stands to reason,” Doc said, “that the farther you can keep away from doctors, the healthier you’ll be. Look at what these doctors call for in their most expensive medicines—snake skins, slow worms, red coral, ambergris, gold leaf, Venice treacle, vipers, oil of stones, rape of storax, camel’s hay, the bellies of skinks—–”

“You mean skunks, don’t you?” Nason asked.

“No,” Doc said, “I mean skinks.”

Nason was skeptical. “What’s a skink?”

“How would I know?” Doc asked. “How would anyone know? There ain’t none in New England, and there ain’t no camel’s hay, neither. What I say is, these doctors that tell you to use skinks’ bellies and camel’s hay in medicines, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and a feller that don’t know what he’s talking about ain’t worth listening to. He ain’t no good, and he wa’n’t never no good, and he won’t never be no good.”

Unconventional as were Doc’s medical beliefs, he really was an expert with a saw and knife, and able to take off a leg or an arm before, almost, the patient could scream. But to my mind the most singular of his powers was the ability to rub a sprain or a rheumatic joint in such a way that the pain, in no time at all, was relieved; and this ability or gift, he declared, was due to the fact that he was a Seventh Son, so that his touch was a guarantee of good fortune.