No lights were seen at Zeke’s, but a vigorous knocking at the door roused the entire amazed and sympathetic family; and while one blew up a roaring fire in the chimney, another heated a warming-pan, another took off the Doctor’s muddy clothes, and Mistress Gardiner concocted a terrible mixture—a compound tea of boneset, snakeroot, and chamomile, which, in spite of the Doctor’s fierce remonstrances and entreaties for a mug of flip instead, she poured down his throat, thus cancelling in one fell dose many a debt of nauseous bolus, pill, or draught that she owed to him.
The perspiring Doctor, as he was being smothered in the great feather-bed, and singed with the warming-pan, and filled to the teeth with scalding herb-tea, gave his parting order to Cuddy—to drive home and tell Mrs. Greene that he had been detained at the Gardiners’ all night “on account of an overdose of spirits,” and then to come for him in the morning. Cuddy listened respectfully and answered obediently, went quietly around behind the Gardiners’ house, calmly placed the horse in the Gardiners’ stable and the chaise in the Gardiners’ barn, slept the sleep of the brave, the obedient, the unhaunted, in the hay in the upper hay-mow, and appeared, as ordered, with horse and chaise at the front door the following morning.
Books by Alice Morse Earle
In Old Narragansett (Ivory Series)
16mo, 75 cents. (See next page)
Colonial Days in Old New York
12mo, $1.25
“Probably the most interesting of Mrs. Earle’s excellent books.”—Literary World.