“If that ain’t Black-cherry!”

“You mean Choke-cherry.”

“No, Black-cherry.  Choke-cherry ain’t no good; but Black-cherry bark’s awful good for lung complaint.  Grandma always keeps it.  I’ve been feeling a bit queer meself” [she was really as strong as an ox].  “Guess I’ll git some.”  So she and Yan planned an expedition together.  The boldness of it scared the boy.  The girl helped herself to a hatchet in the tool box—­the sacred tool box of his father.

Yan’s mother saw her with it and demanded why she had it.  With ready effrontery she said it was to hammer in the hook that held the clothesline, and proceeded to carry out the lie with a smiling face.  That gave Yan a new lesson and not a good one.  The hatchet was at once put back in the box, to be stolen more carefully later on.

Biddy announced that she was going to the grocery shop.  She met Yan around the corner and they made for the lot.  Utterly regardless of property rights, she showed Yan how to chip off the bark of the Black-cherry.  “Don’t chip off all around; that’s bad luck—­take it on’y from the sunny side.”  She filled a basket with the pieces and they returned home.

Here she filled a jar with bits of the inner layer, then, pouring water over it, let it stand for a week.  The water was then changed to a dark brown stuff with a bitter taste and a sweet, aromatic smell.

“It’s terrible good,” she said.  “Granny always keeps it handy.  It cures lots of people.  Now there was Bud Ellis—­the doctors just guv him up.  They said he didn’t have a single lung left, and he come around to Granny.  He used to make fun of Granny; but now he wuz plumb scairt.  At first Granny chased him away; then when she seen that he was awful sick, she got sorry and told him how to make Lung Balm.  He was to make two gallons each time and bring it to her.  Then she took and fixed it so it was one-half as much and give it back to him.  Well, in six months if he wasn’t all right.”

Biddy now complained nightly of “feelin’s” in her chest.  These feelings could be controlled only by a glass or two of Lung Balm.  Her condition must have been critical, for one night after several necessary doses of Balm her head seemed affected.  She became abusive to the lady of the house and at the end of the month a less interesting help was in her place.

There were many lessons good and bad that Yan might have drawn from this; but the only one that he took in was that the Black-cherry bark is a wonderful remedy.  The family doctor said that it really was so, and Yan treasured up this as a new and precious fragment of woodcraft.

Having once identified the tree, he was surprised to see that it was rather common, and was delighted to find it flourishing in his own Glenyan.

This made him set down on paper all the trees he knew, and he was surprised to find how few they were and how uncertain he was about them.