the
worst places I told the most awful lies about how horrible it looked
and placed all the frightful symptoms of every disease I had read to
him, right in his eyes. It sounded dreadful but I knew that it
interested him and helped in a way nothing else could.

"Go on, Phyllie, tell more," he would groan as I stopped for
breath--and on I would go piling inflammation on suppuration.

Finally, after what seemed an age, the doctor drew a long sigh and
looked up at me with a kindly expression that I knew meant "saved."
For a minute I reeled, and I do believe I would have learned what
fainting meant the same day I learned crying, if those little fingers
hadn't held on to me tight while the doctor gave just a whiff of
chloroform to ease the twitching nerves. He had been obliged to do the
operation without it, but risked just the whiff.

"Don't the chloroform smell good, Phyllie?" Lovelace Peyton whispered
up to me as he floated off and his hands relaxed.

"That was the most remarkable performance I ever participated in,"
said the doctor out in the hall after he had finished telling us how
near the sight of both eyes had come to being destroyed from not being
kept drained. "And the two youngsters are the most remarkable I have
yet encountered. Miss Phyllis, let me congratulate you on a nerve and
a talent for imaginative description the like of which I have never
met before. But please somebody explain that boy to me before I catch
the train."

I was glad Roxanne was the one to begin on the subject of Lovelace
Peyton, for only she had enough rosy words to describe him. She did
better than I ever heard her before, and I could see how Father and
the doctor both enjoyed it.

"We will take him right away to college where he can learn to read and
write for himself, in just a few months, and then to operate in some
big hospital before he comes down South to cure hookworm and pellagra
and all the other things other doctors haven't found out about. What
medical college would you advise, Doctor?" she ended by asking, and
her face was so lovely and enthusiastic that it looked almost
inspired. There is no telling where Roxanne's dreams will land the
family now that they will have the money to start on them.

"Well, Miss Byrd," answered the doctor in a tone of voice, that made
me know that he appreciated Roxanne at her true worth, "right now, for
about ten years, I would keep the small doctor in Byrdsville, mostly
out grubbing for