ss of all, was their best friend.

Nature was strong in Margaret Brandt; that same nature which makes the
brutes, the birds, and the insects, so cunning at providing food and
shelter for their progeny yet to come.

Stimulated by nature she sat and brooded, and brooded, and thought, and
thought, how to be beforehand with destitution. Ay, though she had still
five gold pieces left, she saw starvation coming with inevitable foot.

Her sex, when, deviating from custom, it thinks with male intensity,
thinks just as much to the purpose as we do. She rose, bade Martin move
Peter to another room, made her own very neat and clean, polished the
glass globe, and suspended it from the ceiling, dusted the crocodile and
nailed him to the outside wall; and after duly instructing Martin, set
him to play the lounging sentinel about the street door, and tell the
crocodile-bitten that a great, and aged, and learned alchymist abode
there, who in his moments of recreation would sometimes amuse himself by
curing mortal diseases.

Patients soon came, and were received by Margaret, and demanded to see
the leech. "That might not be. He was deep in his studies, searching for
the grand elixir, and not princes could have speech of him. They must
tell her their symptoms, and return in two hours." And oh! mysterious
powers! when they did return, the drug or draught was always ready for
them. Sometimes, when it was a worshipful patient, she would carefully
scan his face, and feeling both pulse and skin, as well as hearing his
story, would go softly with it to Peter's room; and there think and
ask herself how her father, whose system she had long quietly observed,
would have treated the case. Then she would write an illegible scrawl
with a cabalistic letter, and bring it down reverently, and show it the
patient, and "Could he read that?" Then it would be either, "I am no
reader," or, with admiration, "Nay, mistress, nought can I make on't."

"Ay, but I can. 'Tis sovereign. Look on thyself as cured!" If she had
the materials by her, and she was too good an economist not to favour
somewhat those medicines she had in her own stock, she would sometimes
let the patient see her compound it, often and anxiously consulting the
sacred prescription lest great Science should suffer in her hands. And
so she would send them away relieved of cash, but with their pockets
full of medicine, and minds full of faith, and humbugged to their
hearts' content. Populus v