o which he dropped a little camphor, and even a
modicum of castor-oil. Jerome afterwards wondered at his own daring;
but then, with a certainty as absolute as the rush of a stung animal
to a mud bath--as if by some instinct of healing born with him--he
concocted that dark and bitter beverage, and fed it in generous doses
to the sick man. Nobody interfered with him. The neighbor, though
older than Laura and the mother of several children, had never known
enough to bring out their measles and loosen their colds. The herbs
had been gathered and stored by her husband's mother, and for many a
year hung all unvalued in her garret. Luckily Jerome, through his old
gathering for the apothecary, knew them all.

Jerome set one of the neighbor's boys to Upham Corners to tell his
mother of his whereabouts; then he remained all night with young
Henry Leeds, and by dint of his medley of herbs, or his tireless
bathing and nursing, or because the patient had great elasticity of
habit, or because the fever was not, after all, of a dangerous
nature, his treatment was quite successful.

Jerome went home the next morning, and returned late in the
afternoon, to stay overnight again. The day after, the fever did not
appear, and Henry Leeds was on the fair way to recovery. A few weeks
later came the affair of the contract in Robinson's store, and Jerome
grasped a new purpose from the two.

The next day, when he carried some finished shoes to Dale, he bought
a few old medical books, the remnant of a departed doctor's library,
which had been stowed away for years in a dusty corner of the great
country store. This same store included in its stock such
heterogeneous objects, so utterly irrelevant to one another and at
such tangents of connection, that it seemed sometimes like a very
mad-house of trade.

It was of this store that the story was told for miles around how one
day Lawyer Means, having driven over with Colonel Lamson from Upham
Corners, made a bet with him that he could not ask for anything not
included in its stock of trade; and the Colonel had immediately gone
in and asked for a skeleton; for he thought that he was thereby sure
of winning his bet, and of putting to confusion his friend and the
storekeeper. The latter, however, who was not the Bill Dickey of this
time, but an unkempt and shrewd old man of an earlier date, had
conferred with his own recollection for a minute, and asked,
reflectively, of his clerk, "Lemme see, we've