"Yes, eating," the doctor iterated. "Doubts are generally more or less digestive in their origin. Caviar would have made a total agnostic of Saint John himself, and Saint Luke would have been the first one to tell him so, and order a blue pill." As he spoke, he gazed at Brenton critically. "You're running down, man, for a fact. Is this thing worrying you?" he asked kindly. "Well, yes, a little," Brenton confessed. "It's bound to, doctor. I'm not agnostic in the least; I believe that any creed has got to be interpreted with more than a grain of salt, according to one's especial nature and its secretions. However, it's beginning to go against my ideas to discover that there's more salt than belief within me when I get up to recite my Credo." The doctor laughed, in comfortable comprehension. "It depends a little on how your salt analyzes out, Brenton. It may be much more harmless than you think, just a normal precipitate and not a deadly poison. However," and the doctor's face twinkled with humorous sympathy; "it's just about as well to keep it in solution for the present. Therefore, both as your medical adviser and as your senior warden, I'm going to give you a tonic to that end. Moreover, I want you to eat lots of underdone beef, to drink lots of good beer, and spend a good half your time out-doors. Then, if the doubts hang on, come back to me and I'll take another whack at them. They're harmless enough now, like most germs in their early stages of development; but nobody knows what they may turn into, if we let them go on working. Now come along into the laboratory and watch my latest bacillus increase and multiply. It beats the sons of Adam into a cocked hat; and it has more horns than all of your damned doubtings put together." On the threshold of the laboratory, however, the old doctor paused. His accent, when he spoke, was absolutely reverent, despite his words. "Brenton, you all of you admit, whether you believe in eternal law or in special creation, that God made man in His own image. Then, granted a proper ancestry for every germ, there must have been some place for doubtings, even in the original and immortal Pattern. If that's the case, why should we all of us set ourselves up to confound them utterly? They must have some worthy purpose; else they never would have survived." Side by side, the two men hung over the bacillus and forgot the doubtings. Later, when Brenton went away, he took with him the prescription for the tonic and gave the doctor his solemn word of honour that he would straightway telephone for beef and beer. He kept his word so well, and so clever had been the doctor's diagnosis that Reed Opdyke, flat on his back through all the torrid heat of summer, felt moved to express his envious approbation.