f, after all. It's fiery, but it
never does any permanent harm. It's a good medicine, too, for a lot of
things that ail us. Why, Cayenne pepper saved my life once. I really
think so. It was when I was a boy, and boy-like, I had et a lot of green
artichokes. A terrible pain took hold of me. I couldn't breathe. I
thought I was surely going to die; but my mother gave me a dose of
Cayenne and molasses, and in ten minutes I was feeling better.

"And even now, old as I am, when I get cold and feel pretty bad, I go
and take a good stiff dose of Cayenne and molasses, and get to bed. In
fifteen minutes I will be in a perspiration; pretty soon I'll go to
sleep; and next morning I'll feel quite smart again.

"Just you try that, ma'am, the next time you get a cold. You will find
it will do good. It is better than so much of that quinin that they are
givin' us nowadays. That quinin raises Cain with folks' ears. It
permanently injures the hearin'.

"When I advise any one to use Cayenne, either to cure a dog that sucks
eggs or cows that eat acorns, I advise it as a medicine, just as I would
ef the animal was sick. And you mustn't think, ma'am, that we farmers
are so hard-hearted and cruel as all that, for our hearts are just as
tender and compassionate to animals as if we lived in a great city."

Uncle Solon may not have been a safe guide for the nation's finances,
but he possessed a valuable knowledge of farm life and farm affairs.

I went home; and the next morning we tried the quaint old Greenbacker's
"cure" for bitter milk; it "worked" as he said it would.

We also made a sticky wash, of which Cayenne was the chief ingredient,
for the trunks of the young trees along the lanes and in the orchard,
and after getting a taste of it, neither the Black Dutch belted heifers
nor the hogs did any further damage. A young neighbor of ours has also
cured her pet cat of slyly pilfering eggs at the stable, in much the way
Uncle Solon cured his dog.

CHAPTER XXVII

ON THE DARK OF THE MOON

In a little walled inclosure near the roadside at the old Squire's stood
two very large pear-trees that at a distance looked like Lombardy
poplars; they had straight, upright branches and were fully fifty feet
tall. One was called the Eastern Belle and the other the Indian Queen.
They had come as little shoots from grandmother Ruth's people in
Connecticut when she and the old Squire were first married. Grandmother
always spoke of them as "Joe'