1886. FRANKLIN PHILOSOPHIC HERMITAGE INDEPENDENT SCIENTIFIC REPAIR SHOP. CLOCKS, COOPERING, CHAIN SAWS FILED TIN WARE, POLITICS & THEOLOGY TINKERED HUZZAH FOR THE UNION LABOR PARTY. “Jim is an odd stick,” Mr. Everett once said with a feeble smile, as the awkward fellow was heard anathematizing himself as he descended the stairs after an accidental bang of the door, which made us all wince. “Jim is odd, but he has mighty good stuff in him. There isn’t anything that fellow would not do for me, though when I first came here he was pretty fiery; a regular dynamiter you would have thought. But since I started the debating club, and got him to reading history a little, he has calmed down a good deal, and has come to find that hard facts are worth more than all his former rhetorical pyrotechnics about the down-trodden workingman.” At last, with pale and terror-stricken faces, came aunt Madison and Will and Alice with Dr. Ellsworth from Tacoma. Then ensued a new order of things. Jim vanished, talking was forbidden, the noise everywhere disappeared, and the clumsy carts passed silently beneath our window over a thick bed of straw, while tall screens, improvised from sheets and clothes-horses, separated us from each other the greater part of the time. For there was not another room in town to be had, and the little grocery below had been metamorphosed into sleeping apartments for our four attendants. They alternately watched and slept. The new physician threw away the old medicines, substituted new ones, and looked with grave anxiety on Mildred’s flushed face and bounding pulse. She had no bones broken and but a slight wound, and had insisted that my broken bones be set first. After the first shock, the excitement of meeting Mr. Everett and anxiety for us all had sustained her, but now she was sinking fast. The delay in attending to her at the beginning was telling upon her. Whether it was the July heat, the sight of so many faces, and the necessary disturbance when so many were forced to be in one room, I do not know, but as the days went by none of us grew better. Mildred was too ill to be moved to her car. Mr. Everett, though in a fair way to recover, was too weak to stir after his terrible hemorrhage and the strain upon his whole system; while I could not endure to be touched without extreme pain. So during the July days we lay there together in the unfinished attic room, watching the doctor come and go, and tended by loving hands that divided their ministrations and the delicacies that they brought with the suffering ones who lay not far distant.