I went in and jollied the old chap along a bit, and little by little I heard his awful story.

He caught the cold about three days previously, but, after taking the prescription of every loving friend within a radius of four miles, the cold had almost disappeared.  In place of the cold, however, Uncle Peter now had acute indigestion, nervous procrastination, delirium tremens and a spavin on his off fetlock.

All this was caused by a rush of home-made medicine to his brain.

Aunt Martha is a great believer in the simple life, so when Uncle Peter acquired a simple cold she got a simple move on and poured enough simple medicines into him to float a simple tug.

Every friend she had in the world suggested a different remedy, and she tried them all on Uncle Peter.

The cold got frightened and left on the second day, but a woman has to be loyal to her friends, so Aunt Martha kept on spraying Uncle Peter’s system with dandelion tea and fried peppermint until every microbe heard about him and dropped in to pay him a long visit.

The first thing Aunt Martha wanted to do was to rub Uncle Peter’s chest with goose grease.

“Goose grease is such a noisy companion,” Uncle Peter remonstrated.

“Goose grease may be loud, but it is never vulgar,” said Aunt Martha, and she went after it.

In about ten minutes she came back with the painful news that the only thing in the neighborhood which looked like a goose was a quill toothpick, and that was ungreasable.

“But, my dear,” Aunt Martha whispered, “I have something Just as good.  I found this box of axle grease in the barn.”

Uncle Peter shuddered and said nothing.

“My idea is to rub it on your chest and call it goose grease, because the moral effect will be the same,” Aunt Martha told him.

Then that loving wife rubbed so much axle grease into Uncle Peter that for hours afterwards he thought he had a pair of shafts on him, and every time he saw a horse he felt like making fifty revolutions a minute.

I suppose the axle grease gave him wheels in the noddle and made him buggyhouse.

Then Aunt Martha said to him, “Now, Peter, we could cure that cold in five minutes if we can get a woolen stocking to tie around your throat.”

After a little while she found out that the only woolen stocking in our village was owned by the night watchman.

The night watchman said he liked Uncle Peter well enough, but he’d be switched if he was going to walk around all night with one bare foot even to let the Mayor use his stocking for a necktie.

Selfish watchman.

The next morning Uncle Peter’s cold was much worse, but the axle grease had cured his appetite.

About nine o’clock his friend Dave Torrence came in, and after Uncle Peter had barked for him a couple of times Dave decided that the trouble was information of the lungs and he suggested that Uncle Peter should tie a rubber band around his chest and rub his shoulder blades with gasolene.