By the time she returned, with a stout neighboring mother at her side--both of them laden with dried aromatic bouquets, and the visitor, moreover, clasping a bottle or two of household panaceas, such as camphor and castor-oil--Jerome had the sick man steaming in a circle of hot bricks, and was rubbing him under the clothes with saleratus and water.
Jerome's proceedings might not have commended themselves to a school of physicians; but he reasoned from the principle that if remedies were individually valuable, a combination of them would increase in value in the proportion of the several to one.

Sage and thoroughwort, sarsaparilla, pennyroyal, and burdock--nearly every herb, in fact, in the neighbor's collection--were infused into one black and eminently flavored tea, into which he dropped a little camphor, and even a modicum of castor-oil.

Jerome afterwards wondered at his own daring; but then, with a certainty as absolute as the rush of a stung animal to a mud bath--as if by some instinct of healing born with him--he concocted that dark and bitter beverage, and fed it in generous doses to the sick man.

Nobody interfered with him.

The neighbor, though older than Laura and the mother of several children, had never known enough to bring out their measles and loosen their colds.