In old Narragansett; romances and realitiesEarle, Alice Morse
History
In old Narragansett; romances and realities
Earle, Alice Morse
Narragansett Bay Region (R.I.) -- History -- Fiction; Short stories, American
Cuddy nearly fainted in revulsion of feeling. Both returned to the road
and clambered into the chaise. The Doctor was now thoroughly chilled.
He took from the medicine-chest that he always carried (“the Doctor’s
bag o’ tools,” Cuddy called it) a flask that may have contained
medicine, but which smelled more like “kill-devil,” and bade Cuddy
drive with speed to Zeke Gardiner’s; for when the heat of the chase was
over, the valiant old Doctor began to feel the twinges of an enemy that
he dreaded more than any ghost--his rheumatism--and he dare not ride
home dripping with icy grave-water, even if he were full of Jamaica rum.
No lights were seen at Zeke’s, but a vigorous knocking at the door
roused the entire amazed and sympathetic family; and while one blew up
a roaring fire in the chimney, another heated a warming-pan, another
took off the Doctor’s muddy clothes, and Mistress Gardiner concocted a
terrible mixture--a compound tea of boneset, snakeroot, and chamomile,
which, in spite of the Doctor’s fierce remonstrances and entreaties for
a mug of flip instead, she poured down his throat, thus cancelling in
one fell dose many a debt of nauseous bolus, pill, or draught that she
owed to him.
The perspiring Doctor, as he was being smothered in the great
feather-bed, and singed with the warming-pan, and filled to the teeth
with scalding herb-tea, gave his parting order to Cuddy--to drive home
and tell Mrs. Greene that he had been detained at the Gardiners’ all
night “on account of an overdose of spirits,” and then to come for him
in the morning. Cuddy listened respectfully and answered obediently,
went quietly around behind the Gardiners’ house, calmly placed the
horse in the Gardiners’ stable and the chaise in the Gardiners’ barn,
slept the sleep of the brave, the obedient, the unhaunted, in the hay
in the upper hay-mow, and appeared, as ordered, with horse and chaise
at the front door the following morning.
Books by Alice Morse Earle
In Old Narragansett (_Ivory Series_)
16mo, 75 cents. (_See next page_)
Colonial Days in Old New York
12mo, $1.25
“Probably the most interesting of Mrs. Earle’s excellent
books.”--_Literary World._
Margaret Winthrop
(_Women of Colonial and Revolutionary Times_)
With photogravure portrait. 12mo, $1.25
“It can hardly fail to become a classic.”--_Boston Advertiser._
Costume of Colonial Times
12mo, $1.25
A unique and entertaining collection of material, gathered from old
records of every sort, regarding the dress stuffs, wigs, hats, coats,
and every article of costume in vogue among our colonial ancestors.
The Sabbath in Puritan New England
12mo, $1.25
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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