Then Aunt Martha said to him, "Now, Peter, we could cure that cold in five minutes if we can get a woolen stocking to tie around your throat." After a little while she found out that the only woolen stocking in our village was owned by the night watchman. The night watchman said he liked Uncle Peter well enough, but he'd be switched if he was going to walk around all night with one bare foot even to let the Mayor use his stocking for a necktie. Selfish watchman. The next morning Uncle Peter's cold was much worse, but the axle grease had cured his appetite. About nine o'clock his friend Dave Torrence came in, and after Uncle Peter had barked for him a couple of times Dave decided that the trouble was information of the lungs and he suggested that Uncle Peter should tie a rubber band around his chest and rub his shoulder blades with gasolene. Uncle Peter told his friend that he had no desire to become a human automobile, so Dave got mad, kicked the piano on the shins and went home. An hour later Deacon Ed. Sprong, the Mayor's next-door neighbor, came in and in ten minutes he had Uncle Peter making signs to an undertaker. Deacon Sprong decided that Uncle Peter had the galloping asthma with compressed tonsilitis, and a touch of chillblainous croup on the side, aggravated by asparagus on the chest. Deacon Sprong told Uncle Peter to drink a pint of catnip tea, take eight grains of quinine, rub the back of his neck with benzine, soak his ankles in kerosene, take two grains of phenacetine, and drink a hot whiskey toddy every half-hour before meals. Deacon Sprong volunteered to run over every half-hour and help Uncle Peter drink the toddy if it tasted bitter. Then Deacon Sprong went home, and Uncle Peter's temperature came down about ten degrees, while his respiration began to sit up and notice things. During the rest of the day every friend and relative Uncle Peter had in the world rushed in, suggested a couple of prescriptions, and then rushed out again. Aunt Martha tried them all on Uncle Peter. Before the shades of evening fell that day Uncle Peter was turned into a human medicine chest. And to make matters worse, he took some dogberry cordial and it chased the catnip tea all over his interior from Alpha to Omaha. Then Aunt Martha gave him some hoarhound candy to bite the dogberry, so it would leave the catnip alone, but blood will tell, and the hoarhound joined with the dogberry and chased the catnip up Uncle Peter's family tree. But it cured the cold. Now all Uncle Peter had to do was to cure the medicine. CHAPTER VI. JOHN HENRY GETS A SETBACK. Dinner was nearly over that evening at Uncle Peter's villa in Ruraldene when suddenly the doorbell rang violently and two minutes later the servant announced that Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius McGowan were in the parlor. First I decided to faint; then I changed my mind and tried to figure out which would be the most cruelly effective way of killing Bunch Jefferson.