“Wall, wall!” says he, kinder soothin’ly, “Do keep still, how do you expect I’m goin’ to carry you if you touse round so.”
He laid me down on the lounge in the settin’ room, and I never got off of it, for two weeks. Fever set in—I had been kinder unwell for quite a spell, but I wouldn’t give up. I would keep ’round to work. But this axident seemed to be the last hump on the camel’s back, I had to give in, and Tirzah Ann had to come home from school to do the work.
When the news got out that I was sick, lots of folks came to see me. And every one wanted me to take some different kinds of patented medicine, or herb drink—why my stomach would have been drounded out, a perfect wreck—if I had took half. And then every one would name my desease some new name. Why I told Josiah at the end of the week, that accordin’ to their tell, I had got every desease under the sun, unless it was the horse distemper.
One mornin’ Miss Gowdey came in, and asked me in a melancholy way, if I had ever had the kind pox. I told her I had.
“Well,” says she, “I mistrust you have got the very oh Lord.”
It was a Saturday mornin’ and Thomas Jefferson was to home, and he spoke up and said “that was a good desease, and he hoped it would prevail; he knew quite a number that he thought it would do ’em good to have it.”
She looked real shocked, but knew it was some of Thomas J.’s fun. There was one woman that would come in, in a calm, quiet way about 2 times a week, and say in a mild, collected tone,
“You have got the tizick.”
Says I, “the pain is in my foot mostly.”
“I can’t help that,” says she gently, but firmly, “There is tizick with it. And I think that is what ailed Josiah when he was sick.”