this state gits changes enough, from torrid to zero in twenty-four hours
lots of times--I'd like to know where you wintered!"

"Nevertheless and notwithstanding," sez Doctor Bombus, blandly ignoring
Josiah's muttering impatience, "I can but recapitulate my former
prescription, a temporary translation from surrounding environment."

And he gathered up his saddle bags and went out, bagoning me out into
the hall as he did so. And then he advised me to take him to the St.
Louis Exposition.

But I sez, "I dassent, I'm afraid it would open his woonds afresh, he
knowed all the circumstances that had caused his sickness." But he wuz a
Homeopath and believed in takin' the same kind of medicine backward and
forward as it were, sunthin' as the poem runs:

Tobacco hic when you're well will make you sick,
Tobacco hic will make you well when you're sick.

I told him I thought it wuz a hazardous undertakin', and I hardly dast,
but he informed me in words more'n two inches long that he could do
nothing more for him, and if I didn't foller his advice it would be at
my own peril.

CHAPTER IV.

I felt turrible. What wuz I to do to do right? How wuz I to handle this
enormous prescription, St. Louis Exposition, and give it in proper doses
to the beloved patient? I knowed the size of the mind I had to deal
with, I knowed the size of the medicine I wuz told to deal out to that
mind.

Could it stand the strain? Could that small citadel stand a assault of
such magnitude without crumplin' and crumblin' right down? Dast I
venter? And then agin dast I disobey the imperative advice of Doctor
Bombus? So I wuz tossted to and fro like the waves of the sea.

But one thing I wuz determined on, I wouldn't start alone with him in
the state he wuz in, for if he should lose his mind in that immense
place how could I find it with no one to help me? It would be worse than
lookin' for a cambric needle in a hay-mow.

I knew how the shafts of calumny and envy might be aimed at me by his
relations, so I would take along one on his side to share my
responsibility, so if he did lose his mind and couldn't find it agin,
they couldn't find fault with me and say I hadn't done my best. So I
proposed that his niece, Blandina Teeter, should go with us, she is well
off and a willin' creeter.

[Illustration]

Josiah didn't seem to care either way, but languidly remarked that if he
did go he wanted a sky blue neck-tie. That wuz the first sign of
inte