“I declare I was sort of put out with the doctor for sending you down here day before yesterday instead of coming himself,” stated Mrs. Jake immediately, “but I do’ know’s I ever had anything do me so much good as that bottle you gave me.”

“Of course!” laughed Nan.  “Dr. Leslie sent it to you himself.  I told you when I gave it to you.”

“Well now, how you talk!” said Mrs. Jake, a little crestfallen.  “I begin to find my hearing fails me by spells.  But I was bound to give you the credit, for all I’ve stood out against your meddling with a doctor’s business.”

Nan laughed merrily.  “I am going to steal you for my patient,” she answered, “and try all the prescriptions on your case first.”

“Land, if you cured her up ’twould be like stopping the leaks in a basket,” announced Mrs. Martin with a beaming smile, and clicking her knitting-needles excitedly.  “She can’t hear of a complaint anywheres about but she thinks she’s got the mate to it.”

“I don’t seem to have anything fevery about me,” said Mrs. Jake, with an air of patient self-denial; and though both her companions were most compassionate at the thought of her real sufferings, they could not resist the least bit of a smile.  “I declare you’ve done one first-rate thing, if you’re never going to do any more,” said Mrs. Jake, presently. “’Liza here’s been talking for some time past, about your straightening up the little boy’s back,—­the one that lives down where Mis’ Meeker used to live you know,—­but I didn’t seem to take it in till he come over here yisterday forenoon.  Looks as likely as any child, except it may be he’s a little stunted.  When I think how he used to creep about there, side of the road, like a hopper-toad, it does seem amazin’!”

Nan’s eyes brightened.  “I have been delighted about that.  I saw him running with the other children as I came down the road.  It was a long bit of work, though.  The doctor did most of it; I didn’t see the child for months, you know.  But he needs care yet; I’m going to stop and have another talk with his mother as I go home.”

“She’s a pore shiftless creature,” Mrs. Martin hastened to say.  “There, I thought o’ the doctor, how he’d laugh, the last time I was in to see her; her baby was sick, and she sent up to know if I’d lend her a variety of herbs, and I didn’t know but she might p’isen it, so I stepped down with something myself.  She begun to flutter about like she always does, and I picked my way acrost the kitchen to the cradle.  ‘There,’ says she, ’I have been laying out all this week to go up to the Corners and git me two new chairs.’  ’I should think you had plenty of chairs now,’ said I, and she looked at me sort of surprised, and says she, ‘There ain’t a chair in this house but what’s full.’”