The next day when the doctor drove into town with Zip by his side, everyone wanted to pet him and talk about how clever a dog he had been. And they gave him so much candy, cakes and sweets that he had a high fever the next day. However, he went with the doctor just the same, only instead of running around visiting all the dogs and cats he knew wherever the doctor stopped, he just lay still on the seat and slept.
At last the doctor noticed and said, "Zip, I believe you feel sick today, you are so quiet. Let me feel your nose!"
This is what a doctor does for a dog, just as he feels the pulse in a person. If the nose is hot, the dog is sick; if it is cold, he is all right.
Being a homeopathic physician, Dr. Elsworth opened his case and gave Zip three little sugar pills, or so Zip thought, but they had medicine inside of them, and he swallowed them just as if he had been a sick little boy. Inside of two or three hours he felt better and before he went to bed that night the doctor gave him another dose, so when Zip awoke the next day, he was feeling as frisky as ever.
CHAPTER IV
Zip's Disastrous Jump
As the doctor's buggy came to a standstill before Mrs. Mason's house, Zip smelt the delicious spicy odor of freshly baked gingersnaps wafted to his nostrils around the corner of the house from the kitchen.
Knowing Mrs. Mason's cook, Diana, to be considered the best cake and cookie maker in the whole village of Maplewood, he decided to run to the rear of the house and see if she would not give him one. Failing in this, he determined to steal one if he could get it in no other way. So he cautiously crept up the back kitchen steps so he could peek in the open door to see if Diana was alone, but just as he reached the top step he had a surprise, for the Mason's big, spotted cat was curled up asleep under the window. She smelt dog, opened her eyes and without a moment's hesitation bounded on his back. She hated dogs worse than rats, and being nearly the size of Zip, and having long, sharp claws, she was not an enemy to be sneezed at. Consequently it was either fight and arouse the household and so lose his chance of a gingersnap, or get out of her way. He decided on the latter. Seeing a kitchen window open, he gave one bound and jumped through. But, horrors, what had he landed on? Not the kitchen floor, as he thought he would, but on something soft and squashy. Not a pillow either, for it was all soft and gooey, and he was sinking into the soft, white stuff deeper and deeper every second! He tried to jump out, but could not. The stuff was spongy and sticky and clingy, and he had now sunk deep into it up to his stomach.
"What ever shall I do?" he thought to himself, when horrors! the kitchen door opened and Diana, a big, fat darky with a red and yellow spotted turban on her head appeared in the doorway.