me time, and I did not
faint by the wayside, but my idea was that it would save all trouble,
her modesty would not receive a shock, nor mine either, if she would go
behind the little pulpit in the schoolhouse, out of sight of us, take
off her clothes, and hand them over the pulpit to us to examine. She
said she would die first, besides, she knew we would peek around the
pulpit at her. I was getting very nervous, and perspiring a good deal,
and wishing it was over, and I swore, upon my honor, that if she would
go behind the pulpit and disrobe, she should be as safe from intrusion
as though she was in her own room. She swore she would not, and I went
up to her to commence unraveling the mystery. Her dress hooked up in the
back, which I always _did_ think a great nuisance, and I began to unhook
it. I wondered that she stood so quietly and let me unhook it, but
after it was unhooked from the neck to the small of her back, and I was
wishing I was dead, she said:

"There, now that you have got my dress unhooked, a feat I never could
accomplish myself, I will go behind the pulpit and take off my dress, if
you will promise not to look, and that you will help me hook up my dress
when this cruel quinine war is over."

I told her by the great Jehosephat, and the continental congress, I
would help her, and that I would kill anybody who looked, and she went
behind the schoolhouse pulpit, where a country preacher, very likely,
preached on Sundays, and bent over out of sight, and it wasn't half a
minute before she handed the dress over to me. In the pockets I found
several papers of some kind of medicine, and a few small bottles, sealed
up with red sealing-wax.

"Now, the bustle, please, I said, in a voice trembling with emotion.

"Take your old bustle," she said, as she whacked it on the top of the
pulpit.

Well, if anybody had told me that a bustle could be made to hold stuff
enough to fill a bushel-basket, I would not have believed it. We filled
three nose-bags, such as cavalrymen feed horses in, with paper packages
and bottles of quinine. There were thirty bottles of pills, and salves
and ointments, and plasters.

"This is panning out first rate," I said, with less emotion. The emotion
was somehow getting out of me, and the affair was becoming more of a
mercantile transaction. It was like a young druggist going from the side
of his beloved, to the drug store, to take an inventory. "Now hand out
that other lot."

She evide