hink I'm looking any better," she said
mournfully.

Anna keenly enjoyed the worst of health.

She was an anaemic-looking girl with a pasty complexion, and hair several
shades too light to correspond comfortably with it.

Ill-health was the only subject in life in which she took a genuine
interest.

Miss Bibby supposed Anna quite a reader, so often did she find her deep
in a paper, and so the girl was--of medical advertisements. The
marvellous recoveries of persons like Mrs. Joseph Huggins, of Arabella
Street, Chippendale, who had been given up by six leading doctors after
suffering from a blood-curdling list of ailments for seventeen years,
and had been cured after taking one bottle, were a source of unfailing
interest to Anna.

And never did an advertisement offer free a sample bottle of any drug,
no matter for what purpose, but Anna sent instantly and claimed it.

It needed nothing but the announcement on Max's malt bottle of its
tissue-building qualities, and its power of restoring the waste of
nature in the human frame, for the girl at once privately to take a
course of the same treatment and, as the chemist's bill might have
testified, from the same bottle.

Similarly with Lynn's tonic; the accompanying pamphlet said something
about its invigorating powers and the restoration of red corpuscles to
the blood, so Anna at once prescribed it for herself also--out of Lynn's
bottle.

And Miss Bibby's Health Foods that that lady paid for out of her slender
purse--Anna determined that it was these things that gave the temporary
head of the house that curiously delicate clear skin of hers; so being
by no means satisfied with her own complexion, she consistently assisted
herself to a small quantity of each, without, it need hardly be stated,
foregoing any of her hearty meals at the kitchen table with Blake the
gardener.

Miss Bibby had certainly been vaguely surprised at first at the rapid
lowering both of the children's medicines and her own tins, but never
dreaming of suspecting so unusual a cause, soon grew entirely accustomed
to it, and imagined it was the normal consumption.

Her own constitution thus fortified, this morning Anna called loudly
through the window for Max and Lynn to come in this instant and take
their "medsuns."

Max came eagerly; he was so fond of his treacley spoonful it was a
marvel he had not of his own accord jogged some one's memory and
insisted upon the omission being rectified.

B