She had already eaten her dinner, and kept on with her work, pausing often, in her busy going back and forth, to give him some dish, or hospitably urge him to help himself. "You'd better go into the office to wait," she said, as he pushed his chair back from the table. "The doctor'll surely be along pretty soon." The little room, standing by itself in the front yard, did double duty as office and drug-store. Jimmy sat down on the bench beside the door, and studied the odd assortment of bottles on the opposite shelves. He counted them and read all the labels. Then he saw a case of dentist's instruments lying on the table. He examined these curiously, fitting the forceps on each of his teeth, and then looked around for other sources of amusement. Several books with leather bindings lay on the desk, and he sat down to look at them. Books were few in the Perkins household, and the first one he opened proved very entertaining. It was an illustrated work on anatomy, and he was soon completely absorbed in the interesting pictures of bones and muscles. The afternoon was sultry and still. A few flies buzzed on the window-pane. Just outside the door an old hen clucked and scratched for her downy yellow brood. Jimmy could look out and see some one ploughing in a distant field, and hear a lusty voice at intervals, calling, "Gee! Haw! W'-o-a!" to the yoke of oxen. After a long while, when sitting so still had made him drowsy, he went to the door and looked up and down the road. No one was in sight. Even the sun had gone behind a cloud. He began to grow uneasy, as he thought of his mother waiting impatiently for the soda to begin her baking. "If the doctor isn't here by the time I finish looking at the books," he said to himself, "I'll go anyway, without waiting for Maria's medicine." He went back to his chair and turned to the pictures again. Presently he began to yawn. Then his eyelids drooped, and his head nodded so low that it rested on the open book upon the table. He knew nothing more until he felt Mrs. Spinner shaking him by the shoulder. He started up to find the little office nearly dark. "I plumb forgot all about you," Mrs. Spinner said, "until the doctor sent word he couldn't come home to-night. Old Mr. Wakeley's a-dying. You'd better hurry away, for there's a heavy thunder-storm coming up." She weighed out the soda and spices, wrapping each package separately, and then tied them together in one bundle. It was about the middle of the afternoon when Jimmy had gone to sleep. Now the sun had set. The sky was black with clouds, and as he hurriedly mounted his horse and tied the bundle to the horn of the saddle he heard a distant rumble of thunder. Old Blaze was as anxious to get home as her rider, and needed little urging to make her travel her fastest.