The herbs had been gathered and stored by her husband's mother, and for many a year hung all unvalued in her garret.

Luckily Jerome, through his old gathering for the apothecary, knew them all.
Jerome set one of the neighbor's boys to Upham Corners to tell his mother of his whereabouts; then he remained all night with young Henry Leeds, and by dint of his medley of herbs, or his tireless bathing and nursing, or because the patient had great elasticity of habit, or because the fever was not, after all, of a dangerous nature, his treatment was quite successful.
Jerome went home the next morning, and returned late in the afternoon, to stay overnight again.

The day after, the fever did not appear, and Henry Leeds was on the fair way to recovery.

A few weeks later came the affair of the contract in Robinson's store, and Jerome grasped a new purpose from the two.
The next day, when he carried some finished shoes to Dale, he bought a few old medical books, the remnant of a departed doctor's library, which had been stowed away for years in a dusty corner of the great country store.

This same store included in its stock such heterogeneous objects, so utterly irrelevant to one another and at such tangents of connection, that it seemed sometimes like a very mad-house of trade.
It was of this store that the story was told for miles around how one day Lawyer Means, having driven over with Colonel Lamson from Upham Corners, made a bet with him that he could not ask for anything not included in its stock of trade; and the Colonel had immediately gone in and asked for a skeleton; for he thought that he was thereby sure of winning his bet, and of putting to confusion his friend and the storekeeper.