it, had drunk a little of it, Miss
Thorne at once essayed to fill it again. To this Eleanor objected,
but in vain. Miss Thorne winked and nodded and whispered, saying
that it was the proper thing and must be done, and that she knew all
about it; and so she desired Mrs. Bold to drink it up and not mind
anybody.

"It is your duty, you know, to support yourself," she said into the
ear of the young mother; "there's more than yourself depending on
it;" and thus she coshered up Eleanor with cold fowl and port wine.
How it is that poor men's wives, who have no cold fowl and port wine
on which to be coshered up, nurse their children without difficulty,
whereas the wives of rich men, who eat and drink everything that is
good, cannot do so, we will for the present leave to the doctors and
the mothers to settle between them.

And then Miss Thorne was great about teeth. Little Johnny Bold
had been troubled for the last few days with his first incipient
masticator, and with that freemasonry which exists among ladies, Miss
Thorne became aware of the fact before Eleanor had half-finished her
wing. The old lady prescribed at once a receipt which had been much
in vogue in the young days of her grandmother, and warned Eleanor with
solemn voice against the fallacies of modern medicine.

"Take his coral, my dear," said she, "and rub it well with
carrot-juice; rub it till the juice dries on it, and then give it him
to play with--"

"But he hasn't got a coral," said Eleanor.

"Not got a coral!" said Miss Thorne with almost angry vehemence.
"Not got a coral--how can you expect that he should cut his teeth?
Have you got Daffy's Elixir?"

Eleanor explained that she had not. It had not been ordered by Mr.
Rerechild, the Barchester doctor whom she employed; and then the
young mother mentioned some shockingly modern succedaneum which Mr.
Rerechild's new lights had taught him to recommend.

Miss Thorne looked awfully severe. "Take care, my dear," said she,
"that the man knows what he's about; take care he doesn't destroy
your little boy. But"--and she softened into sorrow, as she said it,
and spoke more in pity than in anger--"but I don't know who there is
in Barchester now that you can trust. Poor dear old Doctor Bumpwell,
indeed--"

"Why, Miss Thorne, he died when I was a little girl."

"Yes, my dear, he did, and an unfortunate day it was for Barchester.
As to those young men that have come up since"--Mr. Rerechild, by the
by, was q