ck with the painful news that the
only thing in the neighborhood which looked like a goose was a
quill toothpick, and that was ungreasable.

"But, my dear," Aunt Martha whispered, "I have something Just as
good. I found this box of axle grease in the barn."

Uncle Peter shuddered and said nothing.

"My idea is to rub it on your chest and call it goose grease,
because the moral effect will be the same," Aunt Martha told him.

Then that loving wife rubbed so much axle grease into Uncle Peter
that for hours afterwards he thought he had a pair of shafts on
him, and every time he saw a horse he felt like making fifty
revolutions a minute.

I suppose the axle grease gave him wheels in the noddle and made
him buggyhouse.

Then Aunt Martha said to him, "Now, Peter, we could cure that cold
in five minutes if we can get a woolen stocking to tie around your
throat."

After a little while she found out that the only woolen stocking in
our village was owned by the night watchman.

The night watchman said he liked Uncle Peter well enough, but he'd
be switched if he was going to walk around all night with one bare
foot even to let the Mayor use his stocking for a necktie.

Selfish watchman.

The next morning Uncle Peter's cold was much worse, but the axle
grease had cured his appetite.

About nine o'clock his friend Dave Torrence came in, and after
Uncle Peter had barked for him a couple of times Dave decided that
the trouble was information of the lungs and he suggested that
Uncle Peter should tie a rubber band around his chest and rub his
shoulder blades with gasolene.

Uncle Peter told his friend that he had no desire to become a human
automobile, so Dave got mad, kicked the piano on the shins and went
home.

An hour later Deacon Ed. Sprong, the Mayor's next-door neighbor,
came in and in ten minutes he had Uncle Peter making signs to an
undertaker.

Deacon Sprong decided that Uncle Peter had the galloping asthma
with compressed tonsilitis, and a touch of chillblainous croup on
the side, aggravated by asparagus on the chest.

Deacon Sprong told Uncle Peter to drink a pint of catnip tea, take
eight grains of quinine, rub the back of his neck with benzine,
soak his ankles in kerosene, take two grains of phenacetine, and
drink a hot whiskey toddy every half-hour before meals.

Deacon Sprong volunteered to run over every half-hour and help
Uncle Peter drink the toddy if it tasted bitter.

Then Deacon Sprong wen