"You do not look," said the little man, "like one with a complaint of long duration. As you are sick, I take it that it is with something that has seized you suddenly. And so it _must_ be the plague. I would, if my advice were sought, recommend camphor--a very white substance, unctuous, pellucid, bitterly aromatic, with a grateful coolness, and a fragrance not unlike rosemary. This may be inhaled upon suitable occasions; I have known many persons to carry little bags of it slung under their noses in time of great fright, or small quantities may be taken, dissolved in spirits of wine." "I am not ill," said Anthony, as he seated himself upon the edge of the counter. "I have never been so, not even in the days when I'd tramp, barefooted, away beyond Schuylkill, into the woods and fields, to search out worm-wood, Jerusalem oak and adder's-violet. It may be," he mused, "that I'd then met with broken bones or drowning in the streams, but I was carefully looked after by one who was my good friend. Though, indeed, friends slip from one," and Anthony pulled a deep sigh. "Even those who we thought would remember the longest sometimes have memories short enough." The little apothecary rubbed his bald head and stared; then incredulity, amazement, conviction followed each other across his face. He put a hand upon Anthony's arm. "It is not Anthony Stevens!" denied he. "Do not tell me it is Anthony Stevens; for if you do I shall not believe you." "Who was it told you that false valerian could be found in the swamps near the second ford?" asked the young man. "What boy was it who could find more wax-myrtle than his teacher? Who was it once slept all the way home on a bag of bear's-bed in the bottom of the wagon because he thought if bears could----" "Anthony!" The little apothecary had him by the hand. "Anthony!" The mild old eyes took in the strapping frame, so different from that of the boy he had once known--the well-poised head, the purposeful eyes and chin. "Yes, it's you. I know you when you laugh. Nothing could change that." "Christopher," said Anthony, and his big paw squeezed the thin one tightly, and his eyes beamed, "you have not changed at all. You are not fatter; you have no more hair upon your head; you are just the same human, interested man you were, years and years ago." "As for being human," said Christopher Dent, "why not, since I have around me in their natural concentrated forms all the organic elements upon which humanity is founded? Age is not a hard thing to check when one breathes constantly those fragrances which regulate the action of the system. I could do with more hair upon my head," a little ruefully; "but," with immediate cheeriness, "we'll let that pass, for what signifies hair? It is but a horny growth, meant to protect the skull, which is the casket of the brain, in those times when the world had not yet reached the point of hats."