To illustrate this point, we introduce the following conversation between
the author and a "down east" farmer, in 1852:--
"It's all a humbug, is saxferilla!" exclaimed the old farmer, rapping his
fist "hard down on the old oaken table."
"Why, no; not _all_ sarsaparilla; you must admit--"
"No difference. I tell you it's a pesky humbug, all of it."
[Illustration: "IT'S ALL A HUMBUG."]
Withdrawing his tobacco pipe from his mouth, he laid it on the table, and
standing his thumb end on the board, as a "point of departure," he turned
to me, and said,--
"Why, in the medical books it has been analyzed, and they say it's nothin'
but sugar-house molasses, cheap whiskey, and a sprinkling of essence of
wintergreen and saxafras. Git the book, and see 'Townsend's Saxferilla,'
and that is the article! But they are all alike. Let me tell you about the
great New York saxferilla speculation. One man, S. P. Townsend, started a
compound like this here--nothin' but molasses and whiskey, and essence to
scent it nicely. When he had got it advertised from Texas to the Gut of
Canser (Canso, Provinces), from the Atlantic to the Specific, and was
about to make his fortune off on it, some speculators see he was doin' a
good thing, and, by zounds! they put their heads together, and their
dollars, to have a finger in the pie; and they done it. This is the way
they circumscribed him. They hired an old fellow,--I believe he was a
porter in a store when they found him,--named Jacob Townsend, and a right
rough old customer he was, all rags and dirt, hadn't but one reliable eye,
and a regular old rumsucker.
"Well, they fixed him up with a fine suit of clothes, and, by zounds! they
palmed him off for the original, Simon Pure saxferilla man. So they
advertised him as the real ginuine Townsend, and started a 'saxferilla,'
with his ugly old face on the bottles, and said that the other was
counterfeit, you see; and there he sat, with his one eye cocked on the
crowd of customers that crowded round to see the ginuine thing, you know.
So they blowed the other saxferilla as counterfeit, and finding in a store
a bottle or two that had _fomented_, they made a great noise about the
bogus saxferilla, 'busting the bottles,' and all that, and again asserting
that the Jacob Townsend was the true blue, Simon Pure; and it took, by
zounds! Yes, the public swallowed the lie, the saxferilla, old Jacob, and
all. I hearn that both the parties made a fortune on it."