Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors]

PHOENIX AT BENICIA

BENICIA, Cal., 10th June, 1855.

I OBSERVED your pathetic inquiry as to my whereabouts. I'm all right, sir. I have been vegetating for two or three weeks in this sweet (scented) place, enjoying myself, after a manner, in "a tranquil cot, in a pleasant spot, with a distant view of the changing sea." Howbeit, Benicia is not a Paradise. Indeed, I am inclined to think that had Adam and Eve been originally placed here, the human race would never have been propagated. It is my impression that the heat, and the wind, and some other little Benician accidents, would have been too much for them. It would have puzzled them, moreover, to disobey their instructions, for there is no Tree of Knowledge, or any other kind, in Benicia; but if they had managed this, what, in the absence of figleaves, would they have done for clothing? Maybe tule would have answered the purpose- there's plenty of that. I remarked to my old friend, Miss Wiggins, the other day, in a conversation on Benicia, its advantages and its drawbacks, that there was not

much society here. "Wal," replied the old lady, "thar's two, the Methodists and Mr. Woodbridge's, but I don't belong to nuther." "I don't, either," said I, and the conversation terminated.

Dr. Tushmaker was never regularly bred as a physician or surgeon, but he possessed naturally a strong mechanical genius and a fine appetite; and finding his teeth of great service in gratifying the latter propensity, he concluded that he could do more good in the world and create more real happiness therein by putting the teeth of its inhabitants in good order than in any other way; so Tushmaker became a dentist. He was the man that first invented the method of placing small cog-wheels in the back teeth for the more perfect mastication of food, and he claimed to be the original discoverer of that method of filling cavities with a kind of putty, which, becoming hard directly, causes the tooth to ache so grievously that it has to be pulled, thereby giving the dentist two successive fees for the same job. Tushmaker was one day seated in his office, in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, when a stout old fellow named Byles presented himself to have a back tooth drawn. The dentist seated his patient in the chair of torture, and opening his mouth, discovered there an enormous tooth, on the right-hand side, about as large, as he afterward expressed it, "as a

small Polyglot Bible." I shall have trouble with this tooth, thought Tushmaker, but he clapped on his heaviest forceps, and pulled. It didn't come. Then he tried the turn-screw, exerting his utmost strength, but the tooth wouldn't stir. "Go away from here," said Tushmaker to Byles, "and return in a week, and I'll draw that tooth for you, or know the reason why. Byles got up, clapped a handkerchief to his jaw, and put forth. Then the dentist went to work, and in three days he invented an instrument which he was confident would pull anything. It was a combination of the lever, pulley, wheel and axle, inclined plane, wedge, and screw. The castings were made, and the machine put up in the office, over an iron chair, rendered perfectly stationary by iron rods going down into the foundations of the granite building. In a week old Byles returned; he was clamped into the iron chair, the forceps connected with the machine attached firmly to the tooth, and Tushmaker, stationing himself in the rear, took hold of a lever four feet in length. He turned it slightly. Old Byles gave a groan, and lifted his right leg. Another turn; another groan, and up went the leg again. "What do you raise your leg for?" asked the doctor. "I can't help it," said the patient. Well," rejoined Tushmaker, "that tooth is bound to come now." He turned the lever clear round, with a sud

[ocr errors]
[graphic][merged small][ocr errors]
« AnteriorContinuar »