ess the herbs. One season she sold
seventy dollars' worth.

Catherine took many long jaunts to gather her herbs--thoroughwort,
goldthread, catnip, comfrey, skullcap, pennyroyal, lobelia, peppermint,
old-man's-root, snakehead and others of greater or less medicinal value.
She soon came to know where all those various wild plants grew for miles
round. Naturally she wished to keep her business for herself and was
rather chary about telling others where the herbs she collected grew.

She had heard that thoroughwort was growing in considerable quantity in
the old pastures at "Dresser's Lonesome." She did not like to go up
there alone, however, for the place was ten or eleven miles away, and
the road that led to it ran for most of the distance through deep woods;
a road that once proceeded straight through to Canada, but had long
since been abandoned. Years before, a young man named Abner Dresser had
cleared a hundred acres of land up there and built a house and a large
barn; but his wife had been so lonely--there was no neighbor within ten
miles--that he had at last abandoned the place.

Finally Catherine asked my cousin Theodora to go up to "Dresser's
Lonesome" with her and offered to share the profits of the trip. No one
enjoyed such a jaunt better than Theodora, and one day early the
previous August, they persuaded me to harness one of the work horses to
the double-seated buckboard and to take them up there for the day.

It was a long, hard drive, for the old road was badly overgrown; indeed
we were more than two hours in reaching the place. What was our
amazement when we drew near the deserted old farmhouse to see a
"daguerreotype saloon" standing before it: one of those peripatetic
studios on wheels, in which "artists" used to journey about the country
taking photographs. Of course, card photographs had not come into vogue
then; but there were the daguerreotypes, and later the tintypes, and
finally the ambrotypes in little black-and-gilt cases.

Those "saloons" were picturesque little contrivances, not much more than
five feet wide by fifteen feet long, and mounted on wheels. On each side
was a little window, and overhead was a larger skylight; a flight of
three steps led up to a narrow door at the rear. The door opened into
the "saloon" proper, where the camera and the visitor's chair stood;
forward of that was the cuddy under the skylight, in which the
photographer did his developing.

The photographer was usual