His musical drawling voice died away languidly, and no one made any reply. But Azalea, who knew the mountain people, smiled a little in the darkness, thinking to herself that Mr. McEvoy’s kind treated their neighbors much as he did his snakes. All things come to an end, and the mountain ride was no exception to the rule. Tired, rather stiff and very hungry, Miss Zillah and the two girls were helped out on a horse block made of the huge bole of a chestnut tree, and were ushered by “Mis’ Cassie McEvoy,” into the brightness of her mountain cabin. (She was given the benefit of her full name by the neighbors to distinguish her from her sister-in-law who lived “over beyant.”) Mrs. McEvoy had the table set, the fire blazing on the open hearth, and the kettle simply leaping among the coals. She was quiet and shy, but she wanted her visitors to feel at home and she told them so in a voice even softer and slower than her husband’s. She led them into the second room in the cabin—there were only two—and here, sure enough, was the “company room,” with its two beds heaped high with feather ticks and covered with hand-woven counterpanes. The walls were decorated with large framed patent medicine advertisements, very strong in color, and quite entertaining in subject. One showed St. George slaying the dragon, the legend below advertising some oil that was warranted to cure man of almost all his pains and aches. Another pictured a knight in coat of mail, mounted on a charger, rushing at the fell castle of Disease, his lance in rest. There were many others, and in a moment or two Azalea discovered that these went with the rows of bottles—three deep—upon the mantel shelf. Tall and dark, squat and ruddy, all much labeled and sampled, they stood there to bear witness to the chief interest of Mis’ Cassie McEvoy’s life. “She didn’t look sickly to me,” said Miss Zillah anxiously. “At least no more so than the mountain women usually do.” But Mis’ McEvoy did not long leave Miss Zillah in ignorance of her complaint. “Anybody’d think,” she said while she busied herself setting her supper before them, “that I was trying to p’isen ’em, to look at them medicine bottles in thar. I said to Miles it was a pity I didn’t have no other place to put ’em—” “And I told her,” broke in her husband, “that a chimney shelf was whar folks set out the most costly stuff they had, and by that I reckoned them medicine bottles was whar they belonged.” “I’ve been ailing,” said Mis’ McEvoy, looking straight past her husband at Miss Pace, “for nigh on fifteen years. Nobody,” she said proudly, “can make out what it is that _does_ ail me. Some says it’s this and some says it’s that. Some says take this and some says take that.”