for him to do was
to "tramp it" for a time--live out of doors, sleep out of doors, do
nothing but breathe fresh air and walk. That doctor was Fate, playing
his game behind a pair of spectacles and a bumpy forehead. He saved
Thomas Jefferson Brown, all right; but he turned him into plain Thomas
Jefferson.

For Thomas Jefferson Brown never got over taking his medicine. He kept
on tramping. He got big and broad and happy. Somewhere, perhaps in a
barn, he caught a microbe that made him dislike ordinary work. He would
set to and help a farmer saw wood all day, just for company and grub;
but you couldn't hire him to go into an office, or settle down to
anything steady, for twenty-five dollars a day. He had a scientific name
for the thing that was in him--the _wanderlust_ bug, I think he called
it; and he said it was better than the Chinese lady-bugs that the
government imports to save California fruit.

The nearest Thomas Jefferson ever came to going back to Thomas Jefferson
Brown was when he took a job at braking on the Southern Pacific. That
held him for three, days less than two weeks.

"The _wanderlust_ bug wouldn't stand for it," he explained.

Right after that he struck a farmer's house where the farmer was sick,
almost dying, with three little kids and a frail little woman trying
to keep things up. He worked like ten men for more than a month on that
farm, and when he went away he wouldn't take a cent. That's the sort of
ne'er-do-well Thomas Jefferson was.

He wouldn't beg. He'd go three days without grub, and laugh all the
time. It was mostly in the country and in small villages that he made
his living. He could play seven different kinds of instruments without
any instruments at all. Did it all with his mouth. And the kids--they
went wild over him. In return for his entertainment, Thomas Jefferson
wasn't ashamed to take whatever came to him in the way of odd nickels
and dimes.

Once the manager of a vaudeville house heard him on a street corner, and
offered him a job at fifty a week if he'd sign a contract for a dozen
weeks.

"Good Lord," said Thomas Jefferson, "I wouldn't know what to do with six
hundred dollars!"

The next week he was cooking in a lumber-camp for his board. That's
Thomas Jefferson--or, rather, that's what he was.

And now we're coming to the girl who killed the bug in Thomas
Jefferson--and rescued the king. She was born swell. She has blue
eyes--the sort that can light up a dark day, an