"Why didn't you make a better boy of me, then? You had your chance. Miss Harriet, would you mind coming into my office and just letting me look you over? Come, now, why shouldn't I get a job out of you for once? Here you tackle me on the road-side and get an opinion for nothing." She chuckled, but retorted that she hated doctors and their offices. "I'm not that Drayton cat," she said, "always wanting a doctor to fuss over me. No, you can give me a pill right here--though I haven't a bit of faith in it." "I wouldn't waste a good pill on you," the doctor defended himself. "You've got to come and see me." But when she had promised to come, and William, slapping a rein down on the mare's flank, was jogging along under the sycamore branches, he did not fall into his pleasant drowse again. "She looks so well," he said to himself, "she must be all right--" II Miss Harriet's house, called by Old Chester children "The Stuffed-Animal House," was on the hill-road a stone's-throw beyond the burial-ground. It was of weather-worn brick, and its white lintels, carved in thin festoons of fruit and flowers, were nearly hidden by ivy that stretched dark figures over the marble, and, thickening with the years across the tops of the windows, made the rooms within dim with wavering leaf shadows. A brick path, damp and faintly green with moss, ran down to a green gate set in a ragged privet hedge that was always dusty and choked with dead twigs. The house itself was so shaded by horse-chestnuts that grass refused to grow in the door-yard. A porch shadowed the front door, which opened into a dark, square hall, full of dim figures that hung from the ceiling and stood in cases against the walls. A dusty crocodile stretched overhead, almost the width of the hall; a shark, with varnished belly splitting a little under one fin and showing a burst of cotton, lurked in a dim corner; over the parlor door a great snake, coiled about a branch, looked down with glittering, yellow eyes; and along the walls were cases of very beautiful birds, their plumage dulled now, for it was forty years since Miss Harriet's father had made his collection. But all around the hall were glistening eyes that stared and stared, until sometimes an Old Chester child, clinging to a mother's protecting hand, felt sure they moved, and that in another moment the crocodile's jaws would snap together, or the eagle's wings would flap horribly in the darkness.