"How often must I remind you, Caleb Fink," said the owner of the emporium, "that your sphere is circumscribed to your duties? Attend to those phials, and drain them well before you bottle the citrate of magnesia. The last was spoiled by your unpardonable carelessness. I have not forgotten this!"
And again, with a deprecatory look at me, Caleb Fink subsided into a nonentity.
"Truly has the great and wise Dr. Perkins remarked that 'the women of America are suicidal from the cradle to the grave!' I will give you one of his pamphlets, miss, to take away with you, and you will be convinced that slippers are serpents in disguise in winter weather! The wooden shoes of Germany rather! Ay, or even the sabot of France! You must not stir another step in those. Be seated, pray, and I will not detain you long, while I procure a substitute or protection for such shams, worth nothing in such Siberian weather.—Caleb, a word with you;" and he whispered to his apprentice, who glided away, to return in a trice with a pair of India-rubber overshoes, into which benign boats he proceeded to thrust my unresisting feet, as I stood leaning on the counter; after which a muffler was tied about my ears, and a heavy honey-comb shawl thrown over my shoulders by the same expeditious hands.
"Could you be always as spry, Caleb! Your gloves now—I shall need my own"—and a pair of stalwart knitted mits were forthwith drawn over my passive hands, in which my fingers nestled undivided and warm.
"Now you look something like going for the doctor! My overcoat, Caleb—gloves—fur-cape—cane! All hanging near the bed. There, we are ready now for old Borealis himself, if he chooses to blow! But I forget—God bless me, you are as pale as the ghost of Pompey, at Philippi!—Caleb, the Perkins elixir—a glass!—Now, young lady, just take it down at a gulp. It is the only alcoholic preparation that Napoleon Bonaparte Burress ever suffered to pass his temperate lips. Father Matthew does not object to it at all, I am told, on emergencies. It may be had at this repository very low, either by the gross or dozen."—speaking the last words mechanically, and he tendered me a small glass of some nauseous, bittersweet, and potent beverage, that coursed through my veins like liquid fire.
"Thank you; it is very comforting," I gasped, and, setting the glass down on the counter, I covered my face with my hands and burst into tears.
The whole forlornness of my outcast and eleemosynary condition rushed over me simultaneously with the flood of warmth caused by the Perkins elixir, which nerved me the next moment for the encounter with the elements.
I saw the kindly master of the emporium turn away, either to conceal his own emotion or his observation of mine, and Caleb stood trembling and crying like a girl before me.
I had shrunk, it may be remembered, from the description Sabra gave me of McDermot, when I heard of his red hair and "chaney-blue eyes;" but to this red-haired, hazel-eyed man I yearned instinctively, for there are moral differences discernible in the temperament greater than any other, and, when a red-haired man is tender-hearted, he usually usurps the womanly prerogative, and gushes.
But Caleb's sympathy touched me even more.