him more good than all the doctor's stuff. He'd been out to Demarary,
and everywheres, and he come home in the last stages, and took up with
this whiskey with whitepine chips in it. Well, it's just like this, I
presume it's the balsam in the chips. It don't make any difference how
you git the balsam into your system, so 's 't you git it there. I should
like to have you try whiskey with white-pine chips in it."

He looked convincingly at Mrs. Maynard, who said she should like to try
it. "It's just bronchial with me, you know. But I should like to try it.
I know it would be soothing; and I've always heard that whiskey was the
very thing to build you up. But," she added, lapsing from this vision
of recovery, "I couldn't take it unless Grace said so. She'd be sure to
find it out."

"Why, look here," said Barlow. "As far forth as that goes, you could
keep the bottle in my room. Not but what I believe in going by your
doctor's directions, it don't matter who your doctor is. I ain't sayin'
nothin' against Miss Breen, you understand?"

"Oh, no!" cried Mrs. Maynard.

"I never see much nicer ladies than her and her mother in the house.
But you just tell her about the whiskey with the white-pine chips in
it. Maybe she never heard of it. Well, she hain't had a great deal of
experience yet."

"No," said Mrs. Maynard. "And I think she'll be glad to hear of it.
You may be sure I'll tell her, Mr. Barlow. Grace is everything for the
balsamic properties of the air, down here. That's what she said; and as
you say, it doesn't matter how you get the balsam into your system, so
you get it there."

"No," said the factotum, in a tone of misgiving, as if the repetition of
the words presented the theory in a new light to him.

"What I think is, and what I'm always telling Grace," pursued Mrs.
Maynard, in that confidential spirit in which she helplessly spoke of
her friends by their first names to every one, "that if I could once get
my digestion all right, then the cough would stop of itself. The doctor
said--Dr. Nixon, that is--that it was more than half the digestion any
way. But just as soon as I eat anything--or if I over-eat a little--then
that tickling in my throat begins, and then I commence coughing; and I'm
back just where I was. It's the digestion. I oughtn't to have eaten that
mince pie, yesterday."

"No," admitted Barlow. Then he said, in indirect defence of the kitchen,
"I think you had n't ought to be out in the night air