gging along here at home in the same old
way, your mother and me. We are neither of us real well, and yet I
suppose we are as well as folks at our time of life could expect to be.
Your mother has a good deal of pain in her side all the while and I am
off my feed more or less in the morning. Doc has fixed me up some
condition powders that he says will straighten me out right away.
Perhaps so. Doc has straightened out a good many people in his time. I
wish I had as many dollars as he has straightened out people.

Most every Spring I've had to take a little dandelion root, limbered up
with gin, but this year that didn't seem to get there, as the boys say.
I fixed up a dost of it and took it day and night for a week till I wore
that old dandelion root clear down to skin and bone, but in ten days my
appetite was worse than ever and I had a head on me like a 2-year-old
colt. Dandelion root never served me that way before and your mother
thinks that the goodness is all out of it, may be. It's the same old
dandelion root that I've been using for twenty years, and I believe when
you've tried a thing and proved it's good, you ortent to change off.

I tried to get your mother to take a dost of it last week for the pain
in her side. Fixed up a two-quart jug of it for her, but she can't bear
the smell of gin so I had to take it myself. Dandelion is a great
purifier of the blood, Henry. Some days after I've been taking this
dandelion root for an hour or two I feel as if my blood was pretty near
pure enough. I feel like a new man.

You know I wrote you last winter, Henry, that I was going to buy some
new-fangled hens in the spring and go into the egg business. Well, I
sent east in March for a couple of fowls, one of each sect. They came at
$9 per pair over and above railroad charges, which was some $4.35 more
on top of that.

I thought that as soon as the hen got here and got her things off and
got rested she would proceed to lay some of these here high-priced eggs
which we read of in the Poultry-Keepers' Guide and American Eggist. But
she seemed pensive, and when I tried to get acquainted with her she
would cluck in a croupy tone of voice and go away.

The rooster was no doubt a fine-looking brute when he was shipped, but
when he got here he strolled around with a preoccupied air and seemed to
feel above us. He was a poker-dot rooster, with gray mane and tail, and
he was no doubt refined, but I did not think he should feel above