“It’s cream of wheat gruel,” she said, and added ingratiatingly: “It tastes nice in a tumbler.”
Beulah drank the hot decoction gratefully and found, to her surprise, that it was deliciously made.
Eleanor took the glass away from her and placed it on the tray, from which she took what looked to Beulah like a cloth covered omelet,—at any rate, it was a crescent shaped article slightly yellow in tone. Eleanor tested it with a finger.
“It’s just about right,” she said. Then she fixed Beulah with a stern eye. “Open your chest,” she 60 commanded, “and show me the spot where it’s worst. I’ve made a meal poultice.”
Beulah hesitated only a second, then she obeyed meekly. She had never seen a meal poultice before, but the heat on her afflicted chest was grateful to her. Antiphlogistine was only Denver mud anyhow. Meekly, also, she took the six grains of quinine and the weak dose of jamaica ginger and water that she was next offered. She felt encouraged and refreshed enough by this treatment to display some slight curiosity when the little girl produced a card of villainous looking safety-pins.
“I’m going to pin you in with these, Aunt Beulah,” she said, “and then sweat your cold out of you.”
“Indeed, you’re not,” Beulah said; “don’t be absurd, Eleanor. The theory of the grip is—,” but she was addressing merely the vanishing hem of cook’s voluminous apron.
The child returned almost instantly with three objects of assorted sizes that Beulah could not identify. From the outside they looked like red flannel and from the way Eleanor handled them it was evident that they also were hot.
“I het—heated the flatirons,” Eleanor explained, 61 “the way I do for Grandma, and I’m going to spread ’em around you, after you’re pinned in the blankets, and you got to lie there till you prespire, and prespire good.”
“I won’t do it,” Beulah moaned, “I won’t do any such thing. Go away, child.”