next morning, and everything inside of me went on as usual. Turk came in the evening, and we compared notes, as he said. He said then that it was a very bad case indeed, and we must take another bottle of mixture and six more pills each of us. I said I wouldn't; he said I should, and that he wouldn't die without me; and as I'm a living woman, he held my head and poured the mixture down my throat. After that, I thought I might as well take the pills, especially as Turk said I'd have to. One may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, you know. They didn't have the slightest effect upon us for better or worse (and the sooner that day comes for me, and the man with the ring, the better I shall like it, my sweet child, and that's plain speaking), and Turk said it was the most wonderful cure that ever was known of the most wonderful complication of diseases that ever was heard of. Now if you can guess what Turk did next, you're a clever boy; but as you never _would_ guess, I'll tell you. He set to work making bread pills by the thousand (we found the board your uncle used to make them with), and he made a great basin of mixture, that tasted for all the world like the mixture in your uncle's bottles. You know, there scarcely _is_ any taste at all in it. He coloured the water, and then we filled all the empty bottles and pill-boxes, and had stock enough to last a month. You would have laughed if you had seen us making the medicine. It was done after the shop was shut and all the children were in bed. We locked the doors, and put something over all the windows and keyholes, and every minute or two Turk wriggled to the door, to slow music, to listen if anybody was outside. We were like conspirators. We had a great run on the pills and mixture on Saturday night, and my heart felt as if it was sinking into my shoes every time I served a box or a bottle; but I was obliged to put a brave face on it, and I served them over the counter as if they were the "real grit," as the Yankees say. When I went to bed, I wondered how many murders I had committed, and how many times I could be hanged. I felt worse on Monday morning when I stood behind the counter; but as the day went on, and I didn't hear of any persons in the neighbourhood dying in convulsions, and as I didn't see any undertaker's men about, I began to get a bit relieved in my mind. And when Mrs. Huxley came in--Mr. Huxley is besieged by a regular army of diseases, asthma, and rackets, and "ketches in the side," as his wife calls them--well, when she came in, and told me how ill her poor dear man was on Saturday night before taking the pills and mixture, and how well he was on Sunday after he'd swallowed two big doses, I began to think better of them. I plucked up courage to ask one and another how everybody was who had taken the physic, and would you believe it, my sweet child, none of them were ever better in their lives. And a story has got