A Beautiful and Tender Girl full of the Purest Sensabilities and Holiest Feelings of which our Nature is Susseptable. That is what we should Strive to be. It must be Awfle.
(DINTY’S DIARY)
Young Dr. Amlie slept over his decision and, in the morning, found it good. His first patient, the little, blowzy, coquettish soubrette who had so enchanted the two small girls, had paid him sixpence (“Discount to the profession,” she coyly murmured) after a winning smile and a sidelong shot from the eased eyes which suggested that there might be other and less commercial reward for his services. Dr. Amlie brought to mind with an effort the grave admonition of the State Board of Medical Examiners.
“A physician’s personal character should therefore be that of a perfect gentleman and above all be exempt from vulgarity of associations, depravity of manners, habitual swearing, drunkenness, gambling, profligacy, or any breach of decorum and from contempt for moral rectitude and religious practice.”
At the moment it struck him as an infringement of personal liberty. Caution intervened; he must consider his professional reputation. He took his sixpence, gave the fair patient a healing lotion, and retired to virtuous if not untroubled slumbers. Undoubtedly his proper course of conduct, he decided, would be to marry and settle down when a suitable match presented itself. Any irregular relation with one of the raffish calling of the stage would be a false start.
After a leisurely breakfast he strolled around to inspect his prospective quarters. The pleasant front room would serve him as an office. There was a closet for his skeleton, a professional extravagance which had cost him a cool eighty dollars, a convenient corner for his cabinet, a dusty carpet on the floor, two splitwood chairs, and a semi-alcove with a day couch where he could make shift to sleep. Upon receipt of a month’s rent in advance, Mrs. Harte was agreeable to his putting in shelves for his equipment, which he had brought carefully packed in his wagon.
Having unloaded, he drove to Main Street, bought some planed whitewood boards, a hammer, a saw and nails, and exhumed from his piled-up library a second-hand copy of that invaluable sixpenny guide, “The Carpenter’s Assistant, or Simple Instruction with Saw and Hammer.” Opening all the windows, he set resolutely to work.
Notwithstanding explicit diagrams in the book, he was having trouble with an angle when he became aware that he was under observation. Two little girls were standing on the sidewalk, contemplating him in solemn silence. He gave them a polite good morning which they returned in kind, and continued with his task. Presently the smaller girl said, in a clear-carrying voice obviously intended for his ear,
“When I had the fever, our doctor bled me until I fainted.”
The other responded, “I had ten leeches.”
After this interchange, there was a silence. He heard the gate swing complainingly on its hinges. The pair were in the yard. One of them was coughing significantly. Patiently he turned around.
“I am Dinty Jerrold,” said the smaller girl. “This is my best friend, Wealthia Latham.”
“How do you do?” said Dr. Amlie.
Dinty gave critical consideration to the work in progress.
“You could hire a good carpenter for six shillings a day,” she observed.
Dr. Amlie removed two nails from his mouth and said, “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”
“We heard you hammering and stopped to make your acquaintance.”
“I’m afraid I’m not prepared for callers.”
“Then we’ll sit on the fence.”
They climbed up, disposing their skirts with propriety. The larger girl said in a soft, throaty voice, “I used to live in this house.”
“Did you?” said the doctor with no great interest. “When?”
“When it was new. I was born here.”
“That was before her pa got so rich,” explained Dinty. “He is awfly rich. Richer than my pa. It is nice to be rich,” she added complacently.
“I daresay.” The young man resumed his work.
“What are the shelves for?”
“Books and medicines.”
“Then I don’t think you are doing it right.”
“What isn’t right about it?” he demanded.
“You’re setting the plank flat. When a medicine bottle tips over, it could roll off. But if you slope the plank in, the bottle would roll against the wall.”
Dr. Amlie looked at the small wiseacre, glanced into the printed “Assistant” and tossed it into a corner.
“Dinty’s cruel smart,” said her admiring companion. She stood up on the fence to peer in at the cluttered floor. “What a lot of books!” she admired. “Have you read them all?”
“Yes.”
“You must be cruel learned.”
“I endeavor to keep abreast of my profession,” he said modestly.
“I’d like to read ’em,” said Dinty.
“They are not for little girls to read.”
“She reads everything,” put in Wealthia. “I don’t see why.”
“How else are you going to find out what you want to know?” said Dinty. She eyed the littered floor disparagingly. “What a mess!” she commented. “Don’t you want us to clear it up?”
“Would you?” he said gratefully.
They flopped joyously to earth and made such a rush for the door that, half way through it, they tripped and sprawled. Still sitting, they addressed one another in a mock antiphony.
Dinty: “Ask your pardon.”
Wealthia: “Grant you grace.”
Duet: “Hope the cat’ll spit’n your face.”
Thereupon they went off into gales of imbecile laughter, sobered suddenly, jumped up and set about their task with diligence. Amidst the welter that strewed the floor Dinty came upon a scroll which she hung upon the wall, the better to read it. It was inscribed,
HORACE AMLIE, M.D.
Certificated in Physic & Surgery,
New York State Board.
FEES
Wealthia whispered to her companion, “What’s emesis?”
It was not in Dinty’s nature to confess ignorance. “Having a baby,” she replied in the same tone. “The doctor fetches it and you pay him fifteen cents.”
“That’s cheap,” said Wealthia admiringly. “Let’s get our babies from him. Maybe they’d look like him. Don’t you think he’s cruel handsome?”
“Mm-mm-mm, yes,” said Dinty. “But I’m not going to have mine till I’m married.”
They pursued their toil until the last item was dusted and placed. The young man thanked them and produced a box from which he dispensed a lollipop to each. Taking this as dismissal, they bobbed their curtseys in well-schooled unison and departed.
Said Squire Jerrold to his wife at breakfast, “There’s a new young man in town. A physician.”
Dinty looked up from her mush-and-milk. “I know him,” she volunteered. “Dr. Amlie.”
“Oh! You know him, Mischief.” The Squire’s attitude toward this child of his old age was one of perpetual entertainment. “What’s he like?”
“Nice,” said Dinty reflectively, “but violent. He said”—she looked sidelong at her mother—“a bad word.”
“I’m often tempted to say it, myself, when you’re at your didoes,” said her father. “What were you doing to him?”
“He was putting up a shelf all wrong and I told him so.”
“You would!” said the Squire. He turned to his wife. “Young Amlie attended Hamilton College under the learned and pious Dr. Azel Backus, as did my third son. He is doubtless a young gentleman of culture and parts. We must ask him to supper. Another physician would be no bad thing to have in Palmyra.”
“I am perfectly satisfied with Dr. Murchison,” said Mrs. Jerrold with a martyred air. “He understands my sufferings.”
“We must have a few of our representative citizens to meet him,” pursued the Squire.
“It would be nice for him if I was there,” said Dinty complacently. “He knows me.”
“The place for little girls is in bed,” said her mother.
“I hadn’t contemplated inviting any ladies, Poppet,” said the Squire. “But we’ll see.”
Upon receipt of Squire Jerrold’s polite note, Dr. Horace Amlie dressed himself with particularity, set his neckcloth with his best cameo, polished his boots to a fine gloss, imparted a touch of oil to his hair, scented his handkerchief, took his silver-ringed cane in hand, and set out. He had passed the test of the smithy with reasonable credit. Now he was to face the judgment of a higher, though perhaps no shrewder, tribunal. To say that he was nervous would be to misprize the Amlie courage and self-respect. But his color was perhaps a shade higher, his lips set a bit firmer than was his wont, as he mounted the railed steps and lifted the lion’s head which formed the knocker of the elegantly oak-paneled door.
The knocker did not fall. The door was drawn quickly and quietly open. A small hand caught his wrist. Dinty Jerrold, with the finger of caution pressed to her lips, drew him within.
“I wanted to tell you first,” she said in a breathy whisper. “Be very polite to my ma. Listen to my pa; he admires to talk. Laugh at Lawyer Upcraft’s funny jokes even if you don’t think they’re funny. Neither do I. And whatever you do, don’t let ’em see you’re scared of ’em, specially Mr. Latham,” she went on anxiously. She added in a loud and grown-up tone, “Why, here is Dr. Amlie! How do you do, Dr. Amlie? Pray come in, Dr. Amlie; my dear parents are expecting you.”
The Jerrolds, husband and wife, gave him a pleasant greeting. Deacon Dillard, faintly scented with the mint whose distillation Was making him one of the rich and respected men of the region, nodded stiffly to him from a rosewood sofa and resumed his conversation with Lawyer Upcraft. From the other corner Genter Latham gave the newcomer a quick glance in which there was no acknowledgment of recognition. Mr. Van Wie sat, straight-backed in a straight-backed chair, making noiseless estimates with his lips. The host presented the stranger in handsome terms. The Rev. Theron Strang, he explained, was unable to attend as he was wrestling with his Sunday discourse, which would probably be a riproarer.
“Why, Mr. Jerrold!” said his wife in tittering reproof.
A peach brandy was served and the company went in to supper. The Jerrolds lived sumptuously. Silver, glass and napery were of the best and there was a sound French wine of the rich vintage of 1814. Watchful from her observation post at a small stand set in the window embrasure, Dinty marked with approval the young man’s moderation as the bottle passed. The other guests were less cautious. Presently they were plying the stranger with questions, all but her father who sat back quietly smiling, and Mrs. Jerrold who sipped elderberry brew in a ladylike manner and said nothing, as was expected of her. Dinty did not approve of the persistency of the interlocutors, Lawyer Upcraft leading like a cross-examiner in court. She deemed it less than polite.
But she soon felt pride in the way in which her protégé stood up under the fire. To all questions pertaining to his attainments and career, he returned frank and full answers. The little listener, her ears fairly wiggling in her eagerness to miss nothing, gathered a pretty complete biography.
Young Amlie had graduated from Hamilton College in the class of 1818 just before his nineteenth birthday.
“With honors,” smilingly interpolated the host. “I took the liberty of examining the report for that year.”
“Who did you ride with?” asked Upcraft. As Dinty knew, he was appraising the other’s training, gathered from the experience of “riding with” some knowledgeable practitioner.
“First with Dr. Swift of Schenectady.”
“Did you find his instructions satisfactory?”
“No,” said the young man bluntly. “I wasted my time and my two-hundred-dollar fee. He had no apparatus, no specimens in materia medica or anatomy, nothing but a damaged skeleton, a cabinet of purges and emetics, and a copy of Thomas’s Practice with three chapters missing.”
“I have heard,” put in the Squire, “that few practitioners ever open a book after they are established.”
“That is not true of those who attended Fairfield Medical College, where I took the course after quitting Dr. Swift,” declared Horace loyally. “Most of them were earnest students of the science. Still less would it apply to the learned Dr. Vought with whom I finished my riding.”
“Book learning, book learning,” croaked Mr. Van Wie. “A skilled midwife brings my children into the world, and I’ll warrant you she never read a book nor needed to.”
“Vought? Dr. John G. Vought?” sniffed Deacon Dillard. “Our Dr. Murchison declares him little better than an experimenting quack.”
Dr. Amlie flushed to his youthful forehead but held himself under control. “Medical men differ in creed and opinion as do the clergy and the bar,” said he.
“I have heard that Dr. Vought neither bleeds nor purges,” boomed Lawyer Upcraft with the fervor of one on the scent of heresy. “How otherwise can the body be voided of its evil humors?”
“Dr. Vought does not discard these methods. But he deplores their excessive use which depletes the patient’s strength. There are milder expedients.”
“A steamer,” barked Mr. Van Wie. “A sweater. Is that your school?”
“Yes,” put in the lawyer with a side glance at Latham. “Define your craft and practice. Are you Sangradorian, Morrisonian, Thomsonian? Do you profess the magnetical art or are you learned in the erudition of the herbist or florist? Are you phlogistic or antiphlogistic, a purger or a puker, a bleeder or a stimulator? Do you follow the diluters and Dr. Hahnemann? A doctor must stand to his creed.”
Horace Amlie turned his deceptively ingenuous smile upon the legal light. “I perceive that you have been recently pleading a medical action, sir.”
“I have. And I prevailed against the Medical Society of the State of New York, young man,” bragged Upcraft.
“Then I should be bold, indeed, to submit myself to your cross-examination,” said Horace blandly. The lawyer blinked.
“Perhaps you hold with no one school,” smiled Squire Jerrold. “Still, you must have your own ideas.”
The other hesitated. “Care of the body,” he said at length. “Cleanliness. Healing medicaments as needful, administered with care and in moderation. Aiding the system to throw off its ailments and detriments.”
“You’ll gain a thin living here on that program,” stated Genter Latham. “We expect more for our money.”
Upcraft returned to the charge. “This Dr. Vought—I am told that he administers corrupt matter from sick cattle under pretense that it cures the smallpox.”
“Prevents, not cures,” corrected the physician.
“Do you hold with that?” asked Deacon Dillard.
“I have specimens of the kine-vaccine in my medicine chest. I would not be without it,” said the doctor stoutly.
“It ought to be prohibited by law,” averred the man of law.
“It ought to be compulsory by law,” asserted the young man hotly.
“Would you give physicians authority to rub a foreign substance into a patient’s blood, willy-nilly?”
“I would. For the protection of the general health.”
Genter Latham folded his thick arms and glared across them with a look like the bristle of steel over a parapet. “Lord help any doctor that laid pox-knife to me or mine, without my consent!”
“I wager Sarah Dorch wishes she’d got vaccinated before it was too late,” piped Dinty importantly.
At the mention of the name an uncomfortable stir was apparent to the stranger. Squire Jerrold shot a swift, covert glance at Genter Latham. Lawyer Upcraft coughed behind his hand. Deacon Dillard and Mr. Van Wie began a hasty conversation about nothing. Mrs. Jerrold said in a strained, shocked whisper,
“Dinty!”
Foreseeing that she would soon be squelched and with the laudable design of imparting information whilst there was still time, the child addressed Dr. Amlie.
“She used to be so pretty. The smallpox went to her face and now she’s awful. I’d rather be cow-poxed any time than look like poor Sarah.”
“To bed at once, Chattertongue,” snapped Mrs. Jerrold.
Dinty cast a look of appeal at her father. Perceiving no support in that quarter, she rose with a martyred air.
“I’m sure I don’t know what I said,” she sighed. “Anything I say, I seem to talk too much. Good night, all.”
Dr. Amlie was the only guest to return the exile’s melancholy farewell.
The investigating committee now proceeded with an inquiry into Dr. Amlie’s personal circumstances and condition. Was he married? He was not. Betrothed? No. Intentions? None. What was his religion? His political affiliation? His opinion of Governor Clinton and Andrew Jackson? How did he feel about the Grand Canal? Did he belong to the militia? Was he a Mason? What were his financial expectations?
He answered or parried the questions as best he was able. Checking up afterward, the inquisitors decided that they had got little more out of him than he was pleased to let them know.
Deacon Dillard, Mr. Van Wie and Lawyer Upcraft left early to attend a trustee meeting. Upon their departure, Genter Latham addressed the young outlander with an air of intending to get at the truth and being satisfied with nothing less.
“Now then, young sir, what fetches you to Palmyra?”
“The canal.”
“You believe that it will bring prosperity?”
“I do.”
“So you follow it. To get the dollars, you go where the dollars are. A sound principle,” approved the great man.
“I have my living to make,” said Horace Amlie frankly. “I am interested in the canal on that side, but for other reasons, also. Wherever the canal goes, fever follows. In the marshes it almost stopped the work.”
“We—that is, Mr. Latham and myself—were considering a contract there,” said the Squire. The magnate scowled. He disliked having his business affairs discussed with outsiders.
“Risky,” said Horace.
“Folderol-diddle!” barked Genter Latham. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Where’s the risk?”
“Another such epidemic might drive away the workmen and imperil the whole project.”
“Pooh! We’ve had no trouble getting diggers around here.”
“Not yet, perhaps. The miasmas set in with warmer weather.” He meditated, then continued, “I have some ideas about checking the malaria before it spreads too far. It would be a national calamity if the great work were hampered.”
“A patriot,” jeered Latham. “A Clintonian patriot. We’re all Clintonians while the contracts fatten our weaselskins. Eh, Jerrold?”
“It is the only faction for a gentleman,” pronounced the Squire. “I consider our young friend to be in the right. It is a national duty to see the work through to a magnificent completion.”
“The fevers will never stop it,” declared Latham. “What is fever? It comes and goes. Nobody knows why. Do you think you know, young man?”
“Not yet.”
“Then let the hare lie in its hollow. You get your living from the sick, don’t you?”
“Yes. But …”
“Then what call have you to meddle with keeping sickness away?”
“It’s part of my professional duty.”
“A looby profession, then. If men fall sick, they die or get well. If they die, others step in to take their places.”
“Mr. Latham, do you know how much the canal has been belated, coming through the marshes?”
“What of it? It’s coming through, ain’t it? And it’s going on.”
“Nearly three-quarters of the workmen were laid off at once on some of the worst stretches.”
“I take a contract,” said Mr. Latham flatly. “I pay men to dig. No Work, no pay. What’s the fever to me?”
“While your men are off, you’re at steady expense for rentals of machinery and keep of animals,” argued the other. “Don’t you reckon in the accrued interest on the money tied up? The fever is your liability.”
Genter Latham grunted. But he was impressed. This young chap had a practical side to him.
Mrs. Jerrold, who had left them to their man-talk, now returned with a pouting complaint that the gentlemen were monopolizing Dr. Amlie, and that she would like a word with him, herself. The Squire issued a humorous warning.
“On guard with Mrs. Jerrold. There’s Quaker blood in her veins. She’ll get something for nothing of you if she can.”
Mrs. Jerrold’s still pretty face twisted itself into a momentary grimace. “My husband will have his little jest,” she complained to his departing back, and immediately justified his forecast by beginning, “I am worried about my little daughter, Dr. Amlie, lest she fall into a decline.”
“She seems healthy enough,” said he, privately reflecting that if anything ailed the child it was too much rather than too little vitality.
“I thought you might tell me,” pursued the mother, “speaking as a friend” (rather rushing the acquaintanceship, this! thought the young man) “is it good for her to take so many baths?”
“How many?”
“One every day. I cannot break her of it.”
Dr. Amlie assumed his most judicial expression. “I do not forebode that it will impair her health,” he pronounced, “if she uses plenty of soap.”
The mother sighed. “A strange creature. I hardly know her for our own. Another untoward habit, she will not sleep in a room that has not a window open to the night air winter or summer.”
“Some authorities hold that fresh air in moderation is beneficial.”
“But, night air,” protested the mother. “Surely it is perilous to breathe the night air.”
“What else is there to breathe at night?” he inquired mildly.
Mrs. Jerrold giggled. “I never thought of that. The almanachs all warn against night air. Which almanach do you prefer, Dr. Amlie?”
At first he did not get her drift. “One is as good as another, I should suppose. The stars in their appointed courses …”
“But they differ so widely in their advice.”
“Advice? Oh!” He was enlightened. “Medical advice, you mean.”
“Yes. The Temperance Almanach contradicts the Masonic, and the Arbiter of Health in the Family sometimes says quite the opposite from the Household Guide in the Friends. Oh, Dr. Amlie, do you think that oaken ashes in old cider are as efficacious as Lee’s Antibilious Pills for gripes?”
Dr. Amlie was wearying of this. “I should consider one as useless as the other,” said he.
She misinterpreted. “I think so, too. I frequently administer both. You would hardly believe it, Dr. Amlie, but my husband says it is all stuff and nonsense. Setting up his opinion against our wisest writers! I call it almost sacrilegious.”
“Isn’t Dr. Murchison your family adviser?”
“Yes. He’s very sympathetic. Sometimes he talks to me about my symptoms for hours. But my daughter positively dislikes him. So I am often reduced to medicating her myself.”
“Out of the almanach?”
“I have my own selection of favorite cures,” she answered smugly. “Would you care to look at them?”
She led him to a glassed-in porch whose shelves, intended for winter growth of plants, were ranged with half the advertised quackeries of the day. After a panegyric on her special favorites among the panaceas, the hostess went off on another tack.
“Araminta is inveterate. She reads day and night whenever I take my eyes off her. Don’t you think, Dr. Amlie, that too much reading dulls one’s interest in life?”
“I hadn’t noticed it in your daughter’s case,” he said dryly.
“Perhaps you would come with me and admonish her against this dangerous habit.”
Between amusement and annoyance, the young man followed his hostess, wondering how much further she would push her endeavors to get medical advice at the price of a supper. She called out, “Araminta! Dr. Amlie is here.” She opened the door.
Dinty was propped on her pillows, with a slender magazine in her hand. A taper, floating in a bowl beside her, dispensed a steady light. The eyes which she turned upon the invaders of her privacy were consciously angelic. The observant physician noticed a nervous motion of her left knee, close to which, beneath the bedclothes there was a slight protrusion. Mrs. Jerrold spoke. “Dr. Amlie will tell you that reading in bed is injurious to health.”
“You’ve only one pair of eyes, you know,” said he. “How would you like to wear ugly, steel-rimmed spectacles for life?”
“I’d like it. People who wear spectacles look so wise.”
Squire Jerrold’s voice sounded from the hallway, summoning his wife. As she excused herself and left, Dr. Amlie bent forward to make out the title of the magazine which the reader had laid down.
“The Bower of Taste,” he read. “ ‘Edited by Mrs. Katherine A. Ware, for the Improvement of the Mind, Morals and Manners of Old and Young.’ Is this your chosen style of self-entertainment?”
“Yes, sir,” cooed Dinty. “Sometimes I read The Whole Duty of Woman, and sometimes I con my hymns and texts.”
“Very laudable. And what is that under the sheet?”
A convulsive and involuntary motion of the leg threw a protection over the concealed object. “Sometimes I take my doll to bed with me,” said Dinty.
“A square doll?” He threw back the covers and took out the book.
“Snoop!” she said. “I hate you.”
He turned the volume in his hand. The title leapt to his eyes: The Fatal Effects of Passion, or the Spanish Grandee.
“Hymns and texts,” he observed.
Dinty wept. “Go and tell Ma. I don’t care.”
He set the book down. “I’d rather see you reading this than the magazine.”
Lips and eyes widened in surprise. “Why?” she breathed.
“It’s better print.”
“Then you won’t tell Ma?”
“No.”
“I love you,” said Dinty.
“Nevertheless, I shouldn’t read too much in bed,” he advised.
“I won’t any more. When do you move in at Mrs. Harte’s?”
“Tomorrow.” He had made a composition with L. St. John on his hotel reservation.
“Let me come and fix up the room for you,” she wheedled. “Wealthy and I. We’d admire to do it. Even Ma allows that I’m a clever house-hussey.”
“Mrs. Harte is looking after me very nicely, thank you.”
“Mrs. Harte! Pooh! She’s a sluttish housekeeper. Men are so dumb! They don’t know when a room’s tidy and when it’s messy. Old Murch’s office is a pigsty. You don’t want to be like him. Do you know Old Murch?”
“I have met Dr. Murchison.”
“I wish you were our doctor instead of him. He puffs and he snuffles. He says, ‘Protrude the unruly member’ when he wants me to stick out my tongue. Silly!”
“Little girls should not judge their elders.”
“Oh, deary me! Are you going to be like that? I’m disappointed. Ma says I must be respectful toward you. Must I? I’d much rather be your little friend.”
Horace struggled with a twitching lip. “Your mother knows best. But you may keep your specially respectful manners for Dr. Murchison.”
“Do you know what Old Murch said to Ma about you? He said you could find plenty of practice for your queer theories in Poverty’s Pinch. Have you got queer theories, Dr. Amlie?”
“Some people might consider them queer.”
“Are you trying them on the Pinch?”
“I don’t know much about the Pinch yet.”
“I’ve got a friend there, Tip Crego.”
“I heard that name, Crego,” said Horace, trying to recall the connection.
“I love Tip. He’s teaching me things about birds and beasts and plants and flowers. He knows more about the woods than anybody in the world. Did you know that a fresh poultice of joe-pye weed will draw the poison out of a snakebite? Tip’s aunt taught him that. Do you think she’s a witch?”
“There are no such things as witches.”
“So Tip says. He says wicked people call Mistress Crego a witch just to put a bad name on her. I’ve watched our broom when she came into the kitchen to sell herbs and it never twitched a bit. That’s a sure sign. Unk Zeb Helms lives at the Pinch. You fixed his sore eyes, didn’t you?”
“How do you know that?”
“Unk Zeb told me. He says you’re a kind young Christian gentleman. You look kind.” She peered shyly up into his face. “Would you do something kind for me, Dr. Amlie?”
“I wouldn’t wonder a bit, Dinty.”
“Tip got his hand hurt. Would you go down to the Pinch and fix it?”
“Certainly. I’ll stop in when I go to see Unk Zeb tomorrow.”
“Old Murch wouldn’t. I asked him. He makes speeches and says we ought to succor the sick and poor. But he only succors the sick and rich. There’s always fever at the Pinch. Mr. Latham says it would be better for Palmyra if the fever took off every soul down there.”
Horace frowned. “Who made Mr. Latham judge of what people are fit to live?”
Dinty beckoned him nearer. “They’re waiting in the parlor,” she whispered.
“Who?”
“The youth and beauty of our fair village,” said she romantically.
“What are they waiting for?”
“You, of course. Don’t be so dumb. Ma sent for ’em. There’s Miss Margaret Van Wie and Miss Thankful Upcraft and Miss Agatha Levering.”
“I’ve seen Miss Levering,” said he incautiously.
“I s’pose you think she’s bee-yootiful. All the young gentlemen do. She’s awfly uppity with them. Now you must set your neckcloth straight and unrumple your hair and go out and let them see whether they want to marry you or not.”
“God bless my soul!” said the startled young man. “You go to sleep, you little owl.”
“Tomorrow you tell me which you like best, and I’ll tell you whether you’re right or wrong,” said Dinty. “Good night respectfully, dear Dr. Amlie.”
Mint juleps perfumed the air as Horace rejoined the two men, Mrs. Jerrold having retired to her room. Serving the newcomer, Squire Jerrold brought up the subject of his wife’s pet nostrums, with which, it appeared, she habitually dosed not only herself but her daughter.
“Sometimes I wonder whether it’s good for the child,” reflected the father vaguely. “What is your opinion, Dr. Amlie?”
“Half of the stuff is unmitigated bilge and the other half diluted poison,” replied Horace, whose inwards were warming to the potent julep.
“Do you tell me so! What would you do with the stuff?”
“Set the bottles up for a cockshy,” said Horace, accepting a refill of his tall tumbler.
“A sporting proposition,” declared Genter Latham. “Twenty paces distance and sixpence a hit.”
Although he had not expected to be taken so literally, Horace was game for the test. They heaped a clothes hamper full of the cures, carried it out back of the barn where there was a convenient stone pile and set up their impromptu gallery. Rendered expert by four years of snowfights at Hamilton, Horace exhibited prodigies of marksmanship. At the end, not a bottle was left unshivered and the stranger was five shillings to the good when he went in to make his manners to the waiting young ladies.
In process of moving his belongings next day, Horace was accosted by the Squire who was on his way to the tavern for a morning dram.
“You shy as neat a rock, sir, as I ever expect to see,” said the gentleman. “But my wife is not speaking to me.”
“And to me?” asked Horace.
“I shouldn’t try,” advised the Squire earnestly.
Horace had made an enemy.