'Well, I've got along very well with everything, from the figs to the brickdust; but one thing puzzled me. If you have any love for me, my sweet child, don't betray me, for I'm not at all sure they couldn't hang me for it; but it pays, my sweet child, and it doesn't do any one any harm, and I shall go on doing it, and risk the consequences. Well, it's this. On the first Saturday I was here, the people came in for uncle Bryan's pills and uncle Bryan's mixture. Well, there was a supply in the drawers, and I served the customers. If there was one of them, my dear, there was fifty, and every one spent his penny or twopence, and a few threepence. Well, during the early part of the week I ran short of the pills and the mixture, and I was puzzled about another supply. I knew that the old gentleman made his own medicine, and I looked about for the prescription, but couldn't find it. Now, for all I knew, the success of the business might depend upon these pills and mixtures, which some of the neighbours are ready to swear by as being able to cure asthma, and consumption, and indigestion, and bronchitis, and dysentery, and flushings, and palpitation, and wooden legs, and sprains, and bruises, and pains in the bowels, and headache, and too much brandy, and low fever, and high fever, and jaundice, and warts, and scrofula, and coughs, and colds, and the chills, and I don't know what all besides. And if you knew the trouble I've taken to put all these things together, you'd cry out, "Bless the little woman! What a painstaking creature she is!" But to come back. Well, for all I knew, if the customers couldn't get these wonderful pills at our shop, they might go elsewhere to buy their tea and sugar, and that would never do. I was in a pucker, and Turk came in last Tuesday night, and I told him my trouble. Says Turk, "How many pills and how many bottles of mixture have you got left?" I counted them. Fourteen bottles of mixture, and eleven boxes of pills, large and small. "And what do they cure?" says Turk. I went over all those things that I've written at the top of this sheet. "I don't feel as if anything particular is the matter with me," says Turk; "how do you feel, Josey?" I told him that I felt the same. "Then," says Turk, "it's quite necessary that you and I should take a bottle of that mixture, and six pills, without one moment's delay. Else it might prove fatal." And would you believe it, my dear? Before I knew where I was, Turk had poured one of the bottles of the mixture down my throat, and another down his own, and made me, willy nilly, swallow pill for pill with him until we had each swallowed half a dozen. "And now," said Turk, "if we die, we'll perish in one another's arms; and I'll come to-morrow night and write our epitaphs. We'll be buried in one grave, and all the neighbours will come to the funeral." I didn't like it, I tell you, and I kept awake all night, fancying I had pains; but I ate a very good breakfast the