“Waal, sir!” exclaimed Mrs. Strobe, with a deep sigh of relief and content, the sparkle again in her little bird-like eye, the parchment-like tint of her visage disappearing under a flush of pleasure. “Did enny mortal ever see ennythin’ done like that! I’d like ter hev some o’ that thar stuff, doctor,” she declared. “Ye mought leave we-uns a bottle.” The powerful odor of a strange drug was diffused through the room, and the physician turned and placed the door a trifle ajar before he approached the fire, where Jake Baintree was already seated. “Set down, doctor,—set down, doctor,” said Mrs. Strobe, pushing a chair toward him. “Yes, sir, I’d like ter hev a bottle. What a thing that physic would be fur fractious chil’n!—put ’em ter sleep off thar meanness. I never hed but one chile,—that thar big buffalo, Eli, thar.” She had resumed her wonted note toward her son, now that he had relapsed into his old familiar self, lacking the dreadful dignity of one about to be summoned to a new and untried world, and no longer exciting the painful tenderness and prescient grief that hang upon a possible loss. “But I hev seen him a many a time whenst it would hev brung a heap o’ peace in the house ef he could hev been put ter sleep that-a-way, in the midst o’ his tantrums. Can’t ye leave a bottle o’ it, doctor?” Isabel looked up apprehensively, thinking herself the possible candidate for this new and unique method of discipline. But the stranger said he had none to spare for the subjugation of domestic insurgents, and no more than he needed himself; and although Marcella observed that, as he put the bottle into its groove in the case and shut the lid with a snap, his face wore a smile of relish or of ridicule, she did not resent it, so grateful was she, so ready to fall at his feet. Still, terrors beset her; it seemed too good to be true. “He ain’t dead, doctor?” she asked, in a tone of expostulation, glancing at the motionless figure on the bed. “Not at all,” he rejoined, showing his fine teeth. “Shet up, Marcelly; ye hev got no sense,” urged her grandmother; for the natty Mrs. Strobe was all herself again. “Set down, doctor, an’ rest yer bones. Won’t ye hev a toddy ter sorter hearten ye up? I hev got some apple-jack hyar strong enough ter climb a tree. Jake,” she continued, turning toward Baintree, “jes’ ketch a-holt o’ the handle o’ that thar jimmy-john in the corner, an’ haul it hyar. I’d ax Marcelly, ’ceptin’ she looks ’bout broke in two; an’ I’d git it myself, ’ceptin’ the jimmy-john’s too nigh my size.”