“Dern you,” said the keeper to Dr. Tibbitt, who was trying to fasten his collar, which had broken loose in his fall; “if the boys was here, and I hollered ‘Hey Rube!’—there wouldn’t be enough left of yer to spread a plaster fer a baby’s bile!”
The Doctor made himself look as decent as the situation allowed, and then he marched toward the town with the light of a firm resolve illuminating his face. The literature of his childhood had come to his aid. He remembered the unkind tailor who pricked the elephant’s trunk. It seemed to him that the tailor was a rather good fellow.
“If that elephant’s disease is gratitude,” thought the Doctor, “I’ll give her an antidote.”
He went to the drug-store, and, as he went, he pulled out a blank pad and wrote down a prescription, from mere force of habit. It read thus:
When the druggist looked at it, he was taken short of breath.
“What’s this?” he asked—“a bombshell?”
“Put it up,” said the Doctor, “and don’t talk so much.” He lingered nervously on the druggist’s steps, looking up and down the street. He had sent a boy to order the stable-man to harness his gig. By-and-by, the druggist put his head out of the door.
“I’ve got some asafœtida pills,” he said, “that are kind o’ tired, and half a pound of whale-oil soap that’s higher’n Haman—“