She went away, wrapped in the thick shawl which Jerome had found in a closet, and himself pinned over the wild fair head, under the quivering chin, while he quieted her with grave admonitions, as if he were her father.  Then he led poor Henry Leeds—­still crying out that he would not have the doctor—­into his house and his bedroom, and got him to bed, though it was a hard task.

“I tell you, Henry,” pleaded Jerome, struggling with him to loosen his neck-band, “you shall not have the doctor; I’ll doctor you myself.”

“You don’t know how—­you don’t know how, J’rome!  She’ll say you don’t know how; she’ll send for him, an’ then, when he’s got all my land, how am I goin’ to get them a livin’?”

“I tell you, Doctor Prescott sha’n’t darken your doors, Henry Leeds, if you’ll behave yourself,” said Jerome, stoutly; “and I can break up a fever as well as he can, if you’ll only let me.  Mother broke up one for me, and I never forgot it.  You let me get your clothes off and get you into bed, Henry.”

Jerome had had some little experience through nursing his mother, but, more than that, had the natural instinct of helpfulness, balanced with good sense and judgment, which makes a physician.  Moreover, he worked with as fiery zeal as if he were a surgeon in a battle-field.  Soon he had Henry Leeds in his feather bed, with all the wedding quilts and blankets of poor young Laura piled over him.  The fire was almost out, for the girl was a poor house-keeper, and not shod by nature for any of the rough emergencies of life.  Jerome had the fire blazing in short space, and some hot water and hot bricks in readiness.

Poor young Laura Leeds had to go almost half a mile for her healing herbs, as the first neighbor was away from home and no one came in answer to her knocks.  By the time she returned, with a stout neighboring mother at her side—­both of them laden with dried aromatic bouquets, and the visitor, moreover, clasping a bottle or two of household panaceas, such as camphor and castor-oil—­Jerome had the sick man steaming in a circle of hot bricks, and was rubbing him under the clothes with saleratus and water.

Jerome’s proceedings might not have commended themselves to a school of physicians; but he reasoned from the principle that if remedies were individually valuable, a combination of them would increase in value in the proportion of the several to one.  Sage and thoroughwort, sarsaparilla, pennyroyal, and burdock—­nearly every herb, in fact, in the neighbor’s collection—­were infused into one black and eminently flavored tea, into which he dropped a little camphor, and even a modicum of castor-oil.  Jerome afterwards wondered at his own daring; but then, with a certainty as absolute as the rush of a stung animal to a mud bath—­as if by some instinct of healing born with him—­he concocted that dark and bitter beverage, and fed it in generous doses to the sick man.  Nobody interfered with him.  The neighbor, though older than Laura and the mother of several children, had never known enough to bring out their measles and loosen their colds.  The herbs had been gathered and stored by her husband’s mother, and for many a year hung all unvalued in her garret.  Luckily Jerome, through his old gathering for the apothecary, knew them all.