ook a
white seidletz powder and a blue one, and dissolved them in separate
glasses, and when Pa came in I asked him if he didn't want some
lemonade, and he said he did, and I gave him the sour one and he drank
it. He said it was too sour, and then I gave him the other glass, that
looked like water, to take the taste out of his mouth, and he drank it.
Well, sir, when those two powders got together in Pa's stummick, and
began to siz and steam, and foam, Pa pretty near choked to death, and
the suds came out of his nostrils, and his eyes stuck out, and as soon
as he could get his breath he yelled 'fire,' and said he was poisoned,
and called for a doctor, but I thought as long as we had a doctor right
in the family there was no use of hiring one, so I got a stomach pump,
and I would have had him baled out in no time, only the proprietor came
in and told me to go and wash some bottles, and he gave Pa a drink of
brandy, and Pa said he felt better."

[Illustration: A new way to take Seidlitz Powders p015]

"Pa has learned where we keep the liquor, and he comes in two or three
times a day with a pain in his stomach. They play awful mean tricks on a
boy in a drug store. The first day they put a chunk of something sort
of blue into a mortar, and told me to pulverize it, and then made it up
into two grain pills. Well, sir, I pounded that chunk all the forenoon,
and it never pulverized at all, and the boss told me to hurry up, as the
woman was waiting for the pills, and I mauled it till I was nearly dead,
and when it was time to go to supper the boss came and looked in the
mortar, and took out the chunk, and said, 'You dum fool, you have been
pounding all day on a chunk of India rubber, instead of blue mass!'
Well, how did I know? But I will get even with them if I stay there long
enough, and don't you forget it. If you have a prescription you want
filled you can come down to the store and I will put it up for you
myself, and then you will be sure you get what you pay for.

"Yes, said the grocery man, as he cut off a piece of limberg cheese and
put on the stove, to purify the air in the room, "I should laugh to see
myself taking any medicine you put up. You will kill some one yet, by
giving them poison instead of quinine. But what has your Pa got his nose
tied up for? He looks as though he had had a fight."

"O, that was from my treatment. He had a wart on his nose. You know that
wart. You remember how the minister told him if ot