o
Cousin Molly Belle's lap. I was too spent for speech.

Cousin Frank's coat and vest were off; his right shirt-sleeve was rolled
up to the shoulder, and he was holding his hand and wrist in a deep
bowl of warm water. The air reeked with the fumes of whiskey and
hartshorn.

I concluded, when I came to think of it the next day, that the whiskey
must have been doing antidotal work by getting into his head, for he
laughed outright at sight of the specific I had brought. Then,
tears--real tears and plenty of them--suffused his eyes and made his
voice weak and husky. Or--was it the whiskey?

"You are a dear, brave, thoughtful Namesake!" he said, clearing his
throat. "Darling!" to his wife who was eyeing the herbs
wonderingly,--"She has been all the way to the lower meadow for those. I
showed her the snake-bite cure to-day. Bruise them and put them on my
wrist. Then Namesake must get off her wet clothes and go to bed. The
danger is over."

I was thirty years old before I found out that what I had risked so much
to procure was not the panacea he had showed me, but common jewel-weed,
or wild touch-me-not, a species of the _Impatiens_ of botanists,
harmless, but not curative.

And they had never let me guess what a blunder I had made!

[Illustration]

Chapter XIV

Miss Nancy's Nerves

The Gateses were our distant relatives. Not nearer than fourth
cousins-in-law, I fancy, but we counted them among our "kinfolks" in
Virginia, calling Mrs. Gates "Cousin Nancy," and Captain Gates, "Cousin
'Ratio." His proper name was Horatio, of course, and he belonged to the
family that gave the Revolutionary hero, Horatio Gates, to his country.

I was slowly getting over the whooping-cough, having taken it, as I took
most "catching" things that fell in my way,--with all my might. I began
to whoop the last of April, and kept it up all summer, when every other
child on the plantation was entirely well.

Captain Gates drove over to our house by the time the breakfast-table
was cleared one sultry August day, bringing in his roomy double buggy a
basket of Georgia peaches--brunettes with crimson cheeks--and the
biggest watermelon I had ever seen, as a neighborly gift to my mother.

"Miss Nancy gave me no peace of my life till I got off with them," he
said in his loud, breezy tones. "There's none of her kin she sets more
store by than by Cousin Ma'y Anna Burwell. And she's as proud as a
peacock of our fruit. I tell her a judgment