"Doc" Fussel, whose sales during the day had been a package of rat poison and a bottle of painkiller, looked like a lemon that has lain too long in the window, when he arose and diffidently offered his suggestion for the relief of Prouty. The doctor's voice when he was frightened had the rich sonorous tones of a mouse squeaking in the wall, and now as he ventured the suggestion that Prouty's hope lay in raising peppermint, his voice was inaudible beyond the fifth row of chairs. In the rear of the room they caught the words "mint" and "still," and were under the impression that he was advocating the manufacture of counterfeit money and moonshine whiskey. As a matter of fact, the doctor advised the purchase of large tracts of land which could be flooded and transformed into bogs. These bogs were to be planted in peppermint, for which, he averred, there was an insatiable demand. The world had yet to have too much peppermint. So long as there were babies there would be colic, and so long as there was colic there would be a need for peppermint; therefore, reasoning along the dotted line from A to Z, there always would be a market. Peppermint was the one industry requiring small capital which had not been overdone. He could go to Illinois and purchase a secondhand still of which he knew, at small cost. A bottling works for preparing and labeling the essence could be established in Prouty, and there was no reason why, in time, Prouty should not become the recognized peppermint center of America. When the doctor sat down, after giving the back of the chair which he gripped a farewell wring that all but tore it loose from its sockets, Mr. Butefish arose and congratulated him upon the novelty of his suggestion and recommended that it be investigated carefully. There was excellent reason to believe that Walter Scales, at no remote date, had been handling kerosene and saltfish, for the air in his vicinity was redolent of these commodities as he arose when called upon as the next in order. Before speaking of the remedy for the present stagnant condition of "the fairest spot that the sun ever shone upon," Mr. Scales stated that he wished to protest thus publicly against the practice which now obtained of pitching horseshoes in the main street of Prouty. There was nothing, he declared vehemently, which made so bad an impression upon a stranger as to see the leading citizens of a community pitching horseshoes in its principal thoroughfare.