into limberness. Then, using awful language, but helpless, he was
carried to the cooling room and there rubbed with the alcohol and oil.
He was taken to the cab more dead than alive. That night he had a little
rest, and dreamed of Her, and how she had sent him a black angel with
white wings. The next day he went with the prize-fighter again, but
informed him that when well he should kill him. For three days this
continued. The fourth day the prize-fighter got drunk and was arrested,
and was sent to jail for thirty days. Meanwhile Markham had continued
the physician's prescriptions faithfully. A week later he was
practically well.

The man, walking again, went to Her. He said, "You have been my
salvation, as usual."

"I don't know," she answered, thoughtfully. "I do know this, though,
dear, that with you away from me and ill, I realized somehow more fully
what you are to me. I wanted to do things. I have read often about a
mother and a child. I think I had something of that feeling. I know now
about us; we must never misunderstand again. I don't think the colored
man helped you much, and I understand he is a most disreputable person."

He looked into her eyes, but uttered only a sentence of two words,
"Little Mother."

Markham visited the doctor, proud on his way of the swing of his legs
again. "It was a pretty swift cure," he said, "and I suppose you ought
to have some of the credit for it."

[Handwriting: illegible prescription]

The doctor advanced the proposition that he ought to have, with nature,
not some, but all of the credit.

"There's a difference in patients," he remarked, "and when you began to
improve you 'hustled.' But my treatment, those prescriptions, offset the
poison--call it microbes, if you wish--in your blood and gave your
physique and constitution and general health a chance. The darky does
not figure."

There was a good-natured debate, Markham being now reasonable, but no
conclusion. What did cure Markham? Was it the physician's treatment, the
course with the prize-fighter, or the effect upon Markham's mind of the
fact that the latter was all from Her? Will some one say?

A week or two after his complete recovery, Markham asked the doctor what
course to follow to avoid a possible recurrence at any time of what he
had endured. The physician was very much in earnest in his answer. "Be
careful of what you eat and drink," he said, "and careful of yourself in
a general way aside from that. D