ayly,
"and I venture to say"--he coughed and smiled again--"it's yours."

"I didn't say it wasn't," replied the unsmiling Doctor, reaching for a
pen and writing a prescription. "Here; get that and take it according to
direction. It's for that cold."

"If I should take the fever," said Richling, coming out of a revery,
"Mary will want to come to me."

"Well, she mustn't come a step!" exclaimed the Doctor.

"You'll forbid it, will you not, Doctor? Pledge me!"

"I do better, sir; I pledge myself."

So the July suns rose up and moved across the beautiful blue sky; the
moon went through all her majestic changes; on thirty-one successive
midnights the Star Bakery sent abroad its grateful odors of bread, and
as the last night passed into the first twinkling hour of morning the
month chronicled one hundred and thirty-one deaths from yellow fever.
The city shuddered because it knew, and because it did not know, what
was in store. People began to fly by hundreds, and then by thousands.
Many were overtaken and stricken down as they fled. Still men plied
their vocations, children played in the streets, and the days came and
went, fair, blue tremulous with sunshine, or cool and gray and sweet
with summer rain. How strange it was for nature to be so beautiful and
so unmoved! By and by one could not look down a street, on this hand or
on that, but he saw a funeral. Doctors' gigs began to be hailed on the
streets and to refuse to stop, and houses were pointed out that had just
become the scenes of strange and harrowing episodes.

"Do you see that bakery,--the 'Star Bakery'? Five funerals from that
place--and another goes this afternoon."

Before this was said August had completed its record of eleven hundred
deaths, and September had begun the long list that was to add
twenty-two hundred more. Reisen had been the first one ill in the
establishment. He had been losing friends,--one every few days; and he
thought it only plain duty, let fear or prudence say what they might,
to visit them at their bedsides and follow them to their tombs. It
was not only the outer man of Reisen, but the heart as well, that was
elephantine. He had at length come home from one of these funerals with
pains in his back and limbs, and the various familiar accompaniments.

"I feel right clumsy," he said, as he lifted his great feet and lowered
them into the mustard foot-bath.

"Doctor Sevier," said Richling, as he and the physician paused half way
be