t was suffering, wasn't she?"

"Yes, she couldn't sleep," Dixie replied, as she spread the damp towel
out on the shelf where the coming sun's rays would dry it. "She says she
sat too long at the spring yesterday. I got up and rubbed her arms and
chest twice with the new liniment. It smells like it's got laudanum in
it; but it didn't deaden her pain."

"I'd 'a' got up myself," Mrs. Hart said, in her plaintive tone, "but I
can't see good enough to help."

"It's well you didn't," Dixie said, lightly, "for you'd just have made
double trouble. I'd have laid down my patient and let her grin and bear
her pain while I was trotting you back to bed and making you lie there.
Don't you ever get up and go stumbling about in the dark while I'm
attending to anything like that."

"I think I'll get up and make the coffee while you are feeding," Mrs.
Hart said. "Mandy nearly dies waiting for it to come after she wakes
up."

"That's right, lay it on her," Dixie laughed, impulsively. "You are
getting like a ripe old toper who is always begging whiskey for
somebody else. You let that coffee-pot alone. The last time you tried
your hand at it you put in a double quantity of corn-meal and couldn't
understand why it didn't have a familiar smell as it was boiling."

"I believe a body does become a slave to the habit," the old woman
agreed. "The other day you was over at Carlton, and left enough already
made for dinner, I accidentally spilled it, and me and Mandy went nearly
crazy. It was one of her bad days, and she couldn't get up, and I
couldn't find the coffee."

"I remember," Dixie answered, "and you both swigged so much at supper to
make up for it that you wanted to talk all night. Oh, you two are a
funny lot! But you've got to wait this time, sure. I'm going to feed
these things and stop their noise."

She had reference to half a hundred fowls, young and old, that were
squawking loudly and fluttering on the steps and even the porch floor.
She disappeared in the kitchen and returned in a moment with a dish-pan
half filled with corn-meal, and into this she poured a quantity of
water, and with her hand stirred the mass into a thick mush. This she
began to throw here and there over the yard like a sower of grain till
the voices of the fowls had ceased and they had fled from the porch.
Then she took up a pail of swill in the kitchen and bore it down to a
pen containing a couple of fat pigs and emptied it into their wooden
trough. Goin