dge of their chairs, and listened to something new, with
mouths half agape. A few times Carey turned from the speaker to face
the audience. He agonized in his heart that it was a closed session, and
that his wife was not there to hear, and that the Girl was missing it.

By the bent backs and flying fingers of the reporters at their table in
front he could see that to-morrow the world would read the Harvester's
speech; and if it were true that the little mother had shortened
her days to produce him, she had done earth a service for which many
generations would call her blessed. For the doctor could look ahead,
and he knew that this man would not escape. The call for him and his
unimpeachable truth would come from everywhere, and his utterances would
carry as far as newspapers and magazines were circulated. The good he
would do would be past estimation.

The Harvester continued. He was describing the most delicate and
difficult of herbs to secure. He was telling how they could be raised,
prepared, kept, and compounded. He was discussing diseases that did not
readily yield to treatment, pointing out what drugs were customarily
employed and offering, if any of them had such cases, and would send
to him, to forward samples of unadulterated stuff sufficient for a test
comparison with what they were using. He was walking serenely and surely
into the heart of every man before him.

Just at the point where it was the psychological time to close, he
stopped and stood a long instant facing them, and then he asked softly,
"Did any man among you ever see the woman to whom he had given a strong
man's first passion of love, slowly dying before him?"

One breathless instant he waited and then continued, "Gentlemen, I
recently saw this in my own case. For days it was coming, so at night I
shut myself in my laboratory, and from the very essence of the purest
of my self-compounded drugs I distilled a stimulant into which I put a
touch of heart remedy, a brace for weakening nerves, a vitalization of
sluggish blood. As I worked, I thought in that thought which embodied
the essence of prayer, and when my day and my hour came, and a man who
has been the president of your honourable body, and is known to all of
you, said it was death, I took this combination that I now present to
you, and with the help of the Almighty and a woman above the price of
rubies, I kept breath in the girl I love, and to-day she is at full tide
of womanhood. As a t