Uncle Peter told his friend that he had no desire to become a human automobile, so Dave got mad, kicked the piano on the shins and went home.

An hour later Deacon Ed. Sprong, the Mayor’s next-door neighbor, came in and in ten minutes he had Uncle Peter making signs to an undertaker.

Deacon Sprong decided that Uncle Peter had the galloping asthma with compressed tonsilitis, and a touch of chillblainous croup on the side, aggravated by asparagus on the chest.

Deacon Sprong told Uncle Peter to drink a pint of catnip tea, take eight grains of quinine, rub the back of his neck with benzine, soak his ankles in kerosene, take two grains of phenacetine, and drink a hot whiskey toddy every half-hour before meals.

Deacon Sprong volunteered to run over every half-hour and help Uncle Peter drink the toddy if it tasted bitter.

Then Deacon Sprong went home, and Uncle Peter’s temperature came down about ten degrees, while his respiration began to sit up and notice things.

During the rest of the day every friend and relative Uncle Peter had in the world rushed in, suggested a couple of prescriptions, and then rushed out again.

Aunt Martha tried them all on Uncle Peter.

Before the shades of evening fell that day Uncle Peter was turned into a human medicine chest.

And to make matters worse, he took some dogberry cordial and it chased the catnip tea all over his interior from Alpha to Omaha.

Then Aunt Martha gave him some hoarhound candy to bite the dogberry, so it would leave the catnip alone, but blood will tell, and the hoarhound joined with the dogberry and chased the catnip up Uncle Peter’s family tree.

But it cured the cold.  Now all Uncle Peter had to do was to cure the medicine.

CHAPTER VI.

JOHN HENRY GETS A SETBACK.

Dinner was nearly over that evening at Uncle Peter’s villa in Ruraldene when suddenly the doorbell rang violently and two minutes later the servant announced that Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius McGowan were in the parlor.

First I decided to faint; then I changed my mind and tried to figure out which would be the most cruelly effective way of killing Bunch Jefferson.

Uncle Peter resented the unexpected arrival of these strangers, because he wanted to sit around and have the home folks tell him how sick he was.

“I’d like to know what Bunch Jefferson means by sending his relatives over to us on a Sunday evening,” my wife’s uncle snapped.  “Why doesn’t he worry old Bill Grey with them, eh?  It’s bad enough for me to have to sneeze my head off before my own people, but I’ll be dod bimmed if I’m going to sit around the parlor and play solos on my bronchial tubes for the edification of strangers—­no, sir!”

Uncle Peter sniffled off to his apartments, and Peaches said she’d try to entertain the visitors.