octor before a very small, ailing baby is about as rational as the
attitude of a good Quaker lady in a little Western country town, who had
induced her husband to subscribe liberally toward the expenses of a
certain missionary on the West Coast of Africa. On his return, the
missionary brought her as a mark of his gratitude a young half-grown
parrot, of one of the good talking breeds. The good lady, though
delighted, was considerably puzzled with the gift, and explained to a
friend of mine that she really didn't know what to feed it, and it
wasn't quite old enough to be able to talk and tell her what it wanted!

CHAPTER IV

COLDS AND HOW TO CATCH THEM

Ancient vibrations are hard to stop, and still harder to control.
Whether they date from our driving back by the polar ice-sheet, together
with our titanic Big Game, the woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth, and the
sabre-toothed tiger, from our hunting-grounds in Siberia and Norway, or
from recollections of hunting parties pushing north from our tropical
birth-lands, and getting trapped and stormbound by the advance of the
strange giant, Winter, certain it is that our subconsciousness is full
of ancestral memories which send a shiver through our very marrow at the
mere mention of "cold" or "sleet" or "wintry blasts."

From the earliest dawn of legend cold has always been ranked, with
hunger and pestilence and storm, as one of the demons to be dreaded and
fought. And, at a little later date, the ancient songs and sayings of
every people have been full of quaint warnings against the danger of a
chill, a draft, wet feet, or damp sheets. There is, of course, a
bitterly substantial basis for this feeling, as the dozens of stiffened
forms whose only winding-sheet was the curling snowdrift, or whose
coffin the frozen sleet, bear ghastly witness. It was, however, long ago
discovered that when we were properly fed and clothed, the Cold Demon
could be absolutely defied, even in a tiny hut made out of pressed snow
and warmed by a smoky seal-blubber lamp; that the Storm King could be
baffled just by burrowing into his own snowdrifts and curling up under
the crust, like an Eskimo dog. Hence, nearly all the legends depict the
hero as finally conquering the Storm King, like Shingebis in the Song of
Hiawatha.

The ancient terror, however, still clings, with a hold the more
tenacious as it becomes narrowed, to one large group of these calamities
believed to be produced by cold,--na