Gradually my mother's eyes grew accustomed to see me working always at my table, and they began to dwell on me, at first unconcernedly, but presently with a kind of struggling observance in them. I hailed this change with gladness, and waited and hoped, and prayed humbly night and morning. Josey West wrote to me regularly, and one day this letter came:
'My dear Chris,--Don't open the packet enclosed in this until you read my letter. If you do, I'll haunt you, and you shall never have a minute's rest again. You told me once that every person in life has a proper groove. I think it very hard that I should have lived all these years without, until now, falling into my proper groove; I am in it at last, but I am ready to slap all the children's faces to think that so many years have been wasted. I was born to be a grocer, and at last a grocer I am. If you can find me a better one than I am, show him to me, and I'll resign. I've been looking over your uncle's books, and, as true as I'm a living woman, I'm taking more money than ever he took, if his figures are right. Every day I make a new customer. There's Mrs. Simpson, the bricklayer's wife, at No. 9. If she's been in the shop once, she's been in it a dozen times to-day and yesterday: all the years the old gentleman kept the shop she didn't spend two-and-twopence in it--that's the sum she mentioned, and as I'm a woman of figures now, I must be precise. She does so like a gossip, she says, and she don't mind getting short weight, she says, so long as she can have a friendly word with her quarter of a pound of moist, and her two ounces of the best mixture. She tried all she knew to get the old gentleman to gossip with her, and as he wouldn't, she wouldn't deal with him. Mrs. Simpson is not the only one. There's Mrs. Primmins, and Mrs. Sillitoe, the butcher's wife, and Mrs. Macnamara, who takes snuff. They all like a gossip, and they all come to have it, and so long as they buy their groceries of me, I shall encourage them. Why, you'd be surprised to see the old shop sometimes! It's quite an Institution.
'Well, I've got along very well with everything, from the figs to the brickdust; but one thing puzzled me. If you have any love for me, my sweet child, don't betray me, for I'm not at all sure they couldn't hang me for it; but it pays, my sweet child, and it doesn't do any one any harm, and I shall go on doing it, and risk the consequences. Well, it's this. On the first Saturday I was here, the people came in for uncle Bryan's pills and uncle Bryan's mixture. Well, there was a supply in the drawers, and I served the customers. If there was one of them, my dear, there was fifty, and every one spent his penny or twopence, and a few threepence. Well, during the early part of the week I ran short of the pills and the mixture, and I was puzzled about another supply. I knew that the old gentleman made his own medicine, and I looked about for the prescription, but couldn't find it. Now, for all I knew, the success of the business might depend upon these pills and mixtures, which some of the neighbours are ready to swear by as being able to cure asthma, and consumption, and indigestion, and bronchitis, and dysentery, and flushings, and palpitation, and wooden legs, and sprains, and bruises, and pains in the bowels, and headache, and too much brandy, and low fever, and high fever, and jaundice, and warts, and scrofula, and coughs, and colds, and the chills, and I don't know what all besides. And if you knew the trouble I've taken to put all these things together, you'd cry out, "Bless the little woman! What a painstaking creature she is!" But to come back. Well, for all I knew, if the customers couldn't get these wonderful pills at our shop, they might go elsewhere to buy their tea and sugar, and that would never do. I was in a pucker, and Turk came in last Tuesday night, and I told him my trouble. Says Turk, "How many pills and how many bottles of mixture have you got left?" I counted them. Fourteen bottles of mixture, and eleven boxes of pills, large and small. "And what do they cure?" says Turk. I went over all those things that I've written at the top of this sheet. "I don't feel as if anything particular is the matter with me," says Turk; "how do you feel, Josey?" I told him that I felt the same. "Then," says Turk, "it's quite necessary that you and I should take a bottle of that mixture, and six pills, without one moment's delay. Else it might prove fatal." And would you believe it, my dear? Before I knew where I was, Turk had poured one of the bottles of the mixture down my throat, and another down his own, and made me, willy nilly, swallow pill for pill with him until we had each swallowed half a dozen. "And now," said Turk, "if we die, we'll perish in one another's arms; and I'll come to-morrow night and write our epitaphs. We'll be buried in one grave, and all the neighbours will come to the funeral." I didn't like it, I tell you, and I kept awake all night, fancying I had pains; but I ate a very good breakfast the next morning, and everything inside of me went on as usual. Turk came in the evening, and we compared notes, as he said. He said then that it was a very bad case indeed, and we must take another bottle of mixture and six more pills each of us. I said I wouldn't; he said I should, and that he wouldn't die without me; and as I'm a living woman, he held my head and poured the mixture down my throat. After that, I thought I might as well take the pills, especially as Turk said I'd have to. One may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, you know. They didn't have the slightest effect upon us for better or worse (and the sooner that day comes for me, and the man with the ring, the better I shall like it, my sweet child, and that's plain speaking), and Turk said it was the most wonderful cure that ever was known of the most wonderful complication of diseases that ever was heard of. Now if you can guess what Turk did next, you're a clever boy; but as you never would guess, I'll tell you. He set to work making bread pills by the thousand (we found the board your uncle used to make them with), and he made a great basin of mixture, that tasted for all the world like the mixture in your uncle's bottles. You know, there scarcely is any taste at all in it. He coloured the water, and then we filled all the empty bottles and pill-boxes, and had stock enough to last a month. You would have laughed if you had seen us making the medicine. It was done after the shop was shut and all the children were in bed. We locked the doors, and put something over all the windows and keyholes, and every minute or two Turk wriggled to the door, to slow music, to listen if anybody was outside. We were like conspirators. We had a great run on the pills and mixture on Saturday night, and my heart felt as if it was sinking into my shoes every time I served a box or a bottle; but I was obliged to put a brave face on it, and I served them over the counter as if they were the "real grit," as the Yankees say. When I went to bed, I wondered how many murders I had committed, and how many times I could be hanged. I felt worse on Monday morning when I stood behind the counter; but as the day went on, and I didn't hear of any persons in the neighbourhood dying in convulsions, and as I didn't see any undertaker's men about, I began to get a bit relieved in my mind. And when Mrs. Huxley came in--Mr. Huxley is besieged by a regular army of diseases, asthma, and rackets, and "ketches in the side," as his wife calls them--well, when she came in, and told me how ill her poor dear man was on Saturday night before taking the pills and mixture, and how well he was on Sunday after he'd swallowed two big doses, I began to think better of them. I plucked up courage to ask one and another how everybody was who had taken the physic, and would you believe it, my sweet child, none of them were ever better in their lives. And a story has got about that your uncle Bryan has gone to some place to make the pills and mixture in secret, so that no one shall find out what is in them. I say nothing, except "Oh," and "Ah," and "Indeed," very mysteriously, and as if I didn't know anything about it (as how should I?), and the effect of these "Ohs" and "Ahs" and "Indeeds" is so extraordinary, that if I stood in a wagon, and talked by the hour together, with music playing all about me, and all the young ones dancing and posing, the thing couldn't work better. People are beginning to do what they never did before--they are buying the medicine in the middle of the week; and two strangers have already come in from a long distance for two boxes of the wonderful pills, one to cure palpitation and the other for the jaundice.
'Turk is getting along famously. He is a real good fellow, and everybody likes him. He is making heaps of new friends, and is doing a fine business. He sends his love to you, and says he will have plenty to tell you when you come home.
'Gus is going to India and Australia with a company; he plays leading business, and has a three years' engagement at twelve pounds a week, and all his travelling expenses paid. Not so bad for Gus; but then he's a genius, my dear.
'I hope Florry is behaving herself; but I am only joking when I say that. Don't you let her fall in love with you, and then break her heart; I'm joking again. When you come to think or us altogether, master Christopher, don't you think we're a re-markable family? If you don't, I do. You'd find it hard to beat us. You should read the letters Florry writes to us; they are perfect gems. Where we all got our cleverness from is a perfect puzzle; but it runs in some families. I'm glad Florry is with your mother; it will do her good. Ah, my dear, do you know I pray every night that you may bring your dear good mother home to us strong and well? I do, my dear, and it does me good.
'The letters that are in the enclosed packet came to the shop this morning. One of them is very heavy. I know your uncle's writing from the account-books he left behind him, and I see that it is his writing on the envelope. If there's any address inside, let me know, and I'll go and drag him home, although it will be the ruin of a fine business I see looming in the future in bread pills and the famous mixture made of coloured water.
'And now, my dear, I must leave off. This is the longest letter I ever wrote in my life, and if anybody had told me that I could have written it, I shouldn't have believed him. All the children send their love and kisses, and I send mine, and six kisses for your mother. When you give them to her, whisper that they're from a queer little woman in Paradise-row who loves both of you very much. Now don't you run away with the idea that I'm going to break my heart over you.
'Oh, I almost forgot to say that the doctor was here to-day. He hasn't time to write, but he says he has read your letter carefully, and he thinks that your mother is going along well. He expects a change very soon for the better. He gave me another prescription for you, which I send in this.
'I never thought much of it till lately, my dear, but really there are a great many good people in the world--But there! if I don't stop at once, I shall go rambling on all night, and there's some one tapping at the door. Come in! Only think, I've written it instead of saying it--Your affectionate friend,