Jerome set one of the neighbor’s boys to Upham Corners to tell his mother of his whereabouts; then he remained all night with young Henry Leeds, and by dint of his medley of herbs, or his tireless bathing and nursing, or because the patient had great elasticity of habit, or because the fever was not, after all, of a dangerous nature, his treatment was quite successful.

Jerome went home the next morning, and returned late in the afternoon, to stay overnight again.  The day after, the fever did not appear, and Henry Leeds was on the fair way to recovery.  A few weeks later came the affair of the contract in Robinson’s store, and Jerome grasped a new purpose from the two.

The next day, when he carried some finished shoes to Dale, he bought a few old medical books, the remnant of a departed doctor’s library, which had been stowed away for years in a dusty corner of the great country store.  This same store included in its stock such heterogeneous objects, so utterly irrelevant to one another and at such tangents of connection, that it seemed sometimes like a very mad-house of trade.

It was of this store that the story was told for miles around how one day Lawyer Means, having driven over with Colonel Lamson from Upham Corners, made a bet with him that he could not ask for anything not included in its stock of trade; and the Colonel had immediately gone in and asked for a skeleton; for he thought that he was thereby sure of winning his bet, and of putting to confusion his friend and the storekeeper.  The latter, however, who was not the Bill Dickey of this time, but an unkempt and shrewd old man of an earlier date, had conferred with his own recollection for a minute, and asked, reflectively, of his clerk, “Lemme see, we’ve got a skeleton somewheres about, ’ain’t we, Eph?” And had finally unearthed—­not adjacent to the old doctor’s medical books, for that would have been to much method in madness, but in some far-removed nook—­a ghastly box, containing a reasonably complete little skeleton.  Then was the laugh all on Colonel Jack Lamson, who had his bet to pay, and was put to hard shifts to avoid making his grewsome purchase, the article being offered exceedingly cheap on account of its unsalable properties.

“It’s been here a matter of twenty-five year, ever sence the old doctor died.  Them books, an’ that, was cleaned out of his office, an’ brought over here,” the old storekeeper had said.  “Let ye have it cheap, Colonel; call it a shillin’.”

“Guess I won’t take it to-day.”

“Call it a sixpence.”

“What in thunder do you suppose I want a skeleton for?” asked the Colonel, striding out, while the storekeeper called after him, with such a relish of his own wit that it set all the loafers to laughing and made them remember it: 

“Guess ye’d find out if ye didn’t have one, Colonel; an’ I guess, sence natur’s gin ye all the one she’s ever goin’ to, ye’ll never have a chance to git another as cheap as this.”