f
even one eye, but taking my features in sections I could see that he had
not overstated my appearance. Perhaps the situation was amusing, too--at
least Eddie, and even the guides, professed to be entertained--but for
me, huddled against one side of a six by eight tent--a tent otherwise
packed with bags and bundles and traps of various kinds--Eddie's things,
mostly, and Eddie himself among them--with a chill rain coming down
outside, and with a face swollen and aching in a desperate way with
poison, the quality of the humor to me seemed strained when I tried to
distinguish it with the part of an eye I had left.

Eddie meantime had dived down into his bag of remedies, happy to have a
chance to use any or all of them, and was laying them out on his
sleeping bag in front of him--in his lap, as it were, for he had not
yet arisen--reading the labels and wondering which he should try on me
first. I waited a little, then I said:

"Never mind those, Eddie, give me your alcohol and witch hazel."

But then came an embarrassing moment. Running his eye over the bottles
and cans Eddie was obliged to confess that not one of them contained
either alcohol or witch hazel.

"Eddie," I said reproachfully, "can it be, in a drug store like that,
there is neither alcohol nor witch hazel?"

He nodded dismally.

"I meant to bring them," he said, "but the triple extract of gelsemium
would do such a lot of things, and I thought I didn't need them, and
then you made fun of that, and--and----"

"Never mind, Eddie," I said, "I have an inspiration. If alcohol cures
it, maybe whisky will, and thank Heaven we did bring the whisky!"

We remained two days in that camp and I followed up the whisky treatment
faithfully. It rained most of the time, so the delay did not matter.
Indeed it was great luck that we were not held longer by that
distressing disorder which comes of the malignant three-leaved plant
known as mercury, or poison ivy. Often it has disqualified me for a week
or more. But the whisky treatment was a success. Many times a day I
bathed my face in the pure waters of the lake and then with the
spirits--rye or Scotch, as happened to be handy. By the afternoon of the
first day I could see to put sirup on my flapjacks, and once between
showers I felt able to go out with Eddie in the canoe, during which
excursion he took a wonderful string of trout in a stagnant-looking,
scummy pool where no one would ever expect trout to lie, and where