"You make me think of Sile Stover, out our way," said Mr. Butters. "He sets up to be a hoss doctor, ye know; hosses and stock gen'lly. Last week he called me in to see a hog that was failin' up. Said he'd done all he could do, and the critter didn't seem to be gettin' no better, and what did I advise?
"'What have ye done?' says I.
"'Wal,' says he, 'I've cut his tail, and drawed two of his teeth, and I dono what else to do,' he says. Hoss doctor! A clo'es-hoss is the only kind he knows much about, I calc'late."
"Wasn't he the man that tried to cure Peckham's cow of the horn ail, bored a hole in her horn and put in salt and pepper,—or was it oil and vinegar?"
Mr. Butters nodded. "Same man! Now that kind of a man will always find folks enough to listen to him and take up his dum notions. I tell ye what it is! You can have drought, and you can have caterpillars, and you can have frost. You can lose your hay crop, and your apple crop, and your potato crop; but there's one crop there can't nothin' touch, and that's the fool crop. You can count on that, sartin as sin. I tell ye, Seth, don't you fill your mother up with none of that pison stuff. She's a good woman, if she did marry a Weaver."
Seth's eyes twinkled. "Well, Uncle Ithe, seein' you take it so hard," he said, "I don't mind tellin' you that I'd kind o' thought the matter out for myself; and it 'peared to me that a half a pint o' molasses stirred up with a gre't spoonful o' mustard and a small one of red pepper would look about the same, and taste jest as bad, and wouldn't do her a mite of harm. I ain't all Weaver now, be I?"
Uncle and nephew exchanged a sympathetic chuckle. At this moment Mr. Homer's meek head appeared at the window.
"There are no letters for you to-day, Mr. Butters," he said, deprecatingly; "but here is one for Miss Leora Pitcher; she is in your neighborhood, I believe?"
"Wal, depends upon what you call neighborhood," Mr. Butters replied. "It's two miles by the medders, and four by the ro'd."
"Oh!" said Mr. Homer, still more deprecatingly; "I was not aware that the distance was so considerable, Mr. Butters. I conceived that Miss Pitcher's estate and yours were—adjacent;—a—contiguous;—a—in point of fact, near together."