laboring and discouraged over the churn; for some
reason the cream had failed to come to butter that morning in a
reasonable time. They had been churning for nearly two hours. It was an
old-fashioned dasher churn, and the labor was far from light. Addison
could not stop to assist them; but I volunteered to do so, and soon
found that I had embarked in a tiresome business, for we had to work at
the dasher for as much as an hour more before the butter came.

That evening I had an ill turn. It may have been due to change of
climate, or of food, or perhaps the unwonted exercise. Gram, however,
was convinced that I had a "worm-turn;" and that night, for the first
time, I made the acquaintance of the Vermifuge Bottle!

Now Gram was a dear old soul, but had certain fixed ideas as to the
ailments of youngsters and the appropriate remedies therefor. Whenever
any one of us had taken cold, or committed youthful indiscretions in
diet, she was always persuaded that we were suffering from an attack of
Worms--which I am spelling with a big W, since it was a very large
ailment in her eyes. To her mind, and in all honesty, the average child
was a kind of walking helminthic menagerie, a thin shell of flesh and
skin, inclosing hundreds, if not thousands, of Worms! And drastic
measures were necessary to keep this raging internal population down to
the limits where a child could properly live.

For this bane of juvenile existence, Gram had one constant, sovereign
remedy in which she reposed implicit faith, and which she never varied
nor departed from, and that was a great spoonful of Van Tassel's
Vermifuge, followed four hours later by two great spoonfuls of castor
oil. Be it said, too, that the castor oil of that period was the
genuine, oily, rank abomination, crude from the bean, and not the
"Castoria" of present times, which children are alleged to cry for! And
as for Van Tassel's Vermifuge, it resembled raw petroleum, and of all
greenish-black, loathly nostrums was the most nauseous to swallow. It
was my fixed belief and hope in those youthful years that, if anywhere
in the next world there were a deep, dark, super-heated compartment far
below all others, it would be reserved expressly for Van Tassel and his
Anthelminthic.

Whenever, therefore, any one of us put in an appearance at the breakfast
table, looking a little rusty and "pindling," without appetite, Gram
would survey the unfortunate critically, with commiseration on her
plac