Free Joe and Other Georgian SketchesHarris, Joel Chandler
General
Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches
Harris, Joel Chandler
Georgia -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
When Helen's father died, in 1867, her mother's sister, Miss Harriet
Tewksbury, a spinster of fifty or thereabouts, who, for the lack of
something substantial to interest her, had been halting between woman's
rights and Spiritualism, suddenly discovered that Helen's cause was the
real woman's cause; whereupon she went to the lonely and grief-stricken
girl, and with that fine efficiency which the New England woman acquires
from the air, and inherits from history, proceeded to minister to her
comfort. Miss Tewksbury was not at all vexed to find her niece capable
of taking care of herself. She did not allow that fact to prevent her
from assuming a motherly control that was most gracious in its
manifestations, and peculiarly gratifying to Helen, who found great
consolation in the all but masculine energy of her aunt.
A day or two after Dr. Buxton's visit, the result of which has already
been chronicled, Miss Tewksbury's keen eye detected an increase of the
symptoms that had given her anxiety, and their development was of such a
character that Helen made no objection when her aunt proposed to call in
the physician again. Dr. Buxton came, and agreed with Miss Tewksbury as
to the gravity of the symptoms; but his prescription was oral.
"You must keep Helen indoors until she is a little stronger," he said to
Miss Tewksbury, "and then take her to a milder climate."
"Oh, not to Florida!" exclaimed Helen promptly.
"Not necessarily," said the doctor.
"Please don't twist your language, Dr. Buxton. You should say
necessarily not."
"And why not to Florida, young lady?" the doctor inquired.
"Ah, I have seen people that came from there," said Helen: "they were
too tired to talk much about the country, but something in their
attitude and appearance seemed to suggest that they had seen the
sea-serpent. Dear doctor, I have no desire to see the sea-serpent."
"Well, then, my dear child," said Dr. Buxton soothingly, "not to
Florida, but to nature's own sanitarium, the pine woods of Georgia.
Yes," the doctor went on, smiling as he rubbed the glasses of his
spectacles with his silk handkerchief, "nature's own sanitarium. I
tested the piny woods of Georgia thoroughly years ago. I drifted there
in my young days. I lived there, and taught school there. I grew strong
there, and I have always wanted to go back there."
"And now," said Helen, with a charmingly demure glance at the
enthusiastic physician, "you want to send Aunt Harriet and poor Me
forward as a skirmish-line. There is no antidote in your books for the
Ku-Klux."
"You will see new scenes and new people," said Dr. Buxton, laughing.
"You will get new ideas; above all, you will breathe the fresh air of
heaven spiced with the odor of pines. It will be the making of you, my
dear child."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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