When the doctor came--he was a mountaineer like the rest of them, a rough good-natured fellow who had "read a course" with somebody and "'tended lectures in Cincinnatty"--he could tell her easily enough what the trouble was. "Pneumony," he said. "And pretty bad at that. He haint hed no health fer a right smart while. He haint never got over thet spell he hed last winter. This yere change in the weather's what's done it. He was a-complainin' to me the other day about thet thar old pain in his chist. Things hes bin kinder 'cumylatin' on him." "He does not know me!" said Louisiana. "He is very ill--he is very ill!" Doctor Hankins looked at his patient for a moment, dubiously. "Wa-al, thet's so," he said, at length. "He's purty bad off--purty bad!" By night the house was full of visitors and volunteer nurses. The fact that "Uncle Elbert Rogers was down with pneumony, an' Louisianny thar without a soul anigh her" was enough to rouse sympathy and curiosity. Aunt 'Mandy, Aunt Ca'line and Aunt 'Nervy came up one after the other. "Louisianny now, she aint nothin' but a young thing, an' don't know nothin'," they said. "An' Elbert bein' sich nigh kin, it'd look powerful bad if we didn't go." They came in wagons or ricketty buggies and brought their favorite medicines and liniments with them in slab-sided, enamel-cloth valises. They took the patient under their charge, applied their nostrums and when they were not busy seemed to enjoy talking his symptoms over in low tones. They were very good to Louisiana, relieving her of every responsibility in spite of herself, and shaking their heads at each other pityingly when her back was turned. "She never give him no trouble," they said. "She's got thet to hold to. An' they was powerful sot on her, both him an' Ianthy. I've heern 'em say she allus was kinder tender an' easy to manage." Their husbands came to "sit up" with them at night, and sat by the fire talking about their crops and the elections, and expectorating with regularity into the ashes. They tried to persuade Louisiana to go to bed, but she would not go. "Let me sit by him, if there is nothing else I can do," she said. "If he should come to himself for a minute he would know me if I was near him." In his delirium he seemed to have gone back to a time before her existence--the time when he was a young man and there was no one in the new house he had built, but himself and "Ianthy." Sometimes he fancied himself sitting by the fire on a winter's night and congratulating himself upon being there. "Jest to think," he would say in a quiet, speculative voice, "that two year ago I didn't know ye--an' thar ye air, a-sittin' sewin', and the fire a-cracklin', an' the house all fixed. This yere's what I call solid comfort, Ianthy--jest solid comfort!" Once he wakened suddenly from a sleep and finding Louisiana bending over him, drew her face down and kissed her.