He left her, and went up to the farm, and got the horse and sleigh again, and drove to another town. It made no difference what doctor he got--to Thyrsis all doctors were alike, the keepers of the keys of health. After several hours’ pursuit he found that this man also was busy. All he could say was that he would try to get out that night. So Thyrsis went back again, to find his wife with flushed face, and beads of perspiration upon her forehead; now sitting up and babbling aimlessly, now sinking back exhausted. He sat once more through a night of torment, holding her hot hands in his, and praying in vain for the coming of the doctor. It was afternoon of the next day before the man finally came, and brought some relief to Thyrsis’ soul, and perhaps also to Corydon’s body. He took her temperature and listened to her breathing, and pronounced it a severe attack of grippe, with a touch of bronchitis; and he laid out an assortment of capsules and liquids, and promised to come again if Thyrsis sent for him. And so the boy set out in the double role of trained nurse and mother’s assistant. He gave Corydon her medicines, and brought fresh water for her, and smoothed her pillows and talked to her, and prepared some delicacies for her when she wished to eat; also he dressed and bathed the baby, and cooked his complex meals and fed them to him; he put on his rubbers and his leggings and his mittens, and the overcoat and peaked hood (which Corydon had devised for him out of eighty cents’ worth of woolly red cloth), and turned him out to “bongie cowtoos” in the snow. Likewise he got his own meals and washed the dishes, and tended the fires and emptied the ashes and filled the lamps and swept the floors; and in the interim between these various duties he fought new battles within himself, and got new side-lights upon Chickamauga and “Bloody Angle”. Section 18. It was two weeks before this siege was lifted, and Corydon was able to take up her burdens once more. It was then March, and the snow had given place to cold sleety rains, and the fields and the ground about their home were miniature swamps full of mud. Thyrsis would tramp through this to the hill-tops where the storm-winds howled, and there vow defiance to his foes, and come home to pour new hope and courage and resolution into a bottomless pit.