Dr. Ketchup walked out, with ruffled dignity, carefully dressed.  His immaculate clothes and his solemn face were the two halves of his stock in trade.  Under the clothes lay buried Ketchup the blacksmith; under the wiseacre face was Ketchup the ignoramus.  Ignoramus he was, but not a fool.  As he rode along back with Jonas, he plied the latter with questions.  If he could get the facts of the case out of Jonas, he would pretend to have inferred them from the symptoms and thus add to his credit.

“What caused this attack, Jonas?”

“I ’low she caused it herself.  Generally does, my friend,” said Jonas.

“Had anything occurred to excite her?”

“Well, yes, I ’low they had; consid’able, if not more.”

“What was it?”

“Well, you see she’d been to Hankins’s preachin’.  Now, I ’low, my medical friend, the day of jedgment a’n’t a pleasin’ prospeck to anybody that’s jilted one brother to marry another, and then cheated the jilted one outen his sheer of his lamented father’s estate.  Do you think it is, my learned friend?”

But Dr. Ketchup could not be sure whether Jonas was making game of him or not.  So he changed the subject.

“Nice hoss, this bay,” said the “doctor.”

“Well, yes,” said Jonas, “I don’t ’low you ever put shoes on no better hoss than this ’ere in all your days—­as a blacksmith.  Did you now, my medical friend?”

“No, I think not,” said Ketchup testily, and was silent.

Mrs. Anderson had grown impatient at the doctor’s delay.  “Samuel!  Oo! oo! oo!  Samuel!  My dear, I’m dying.  Jonas don’t care.  He wouldn’t hurry.  I wonder you trusted him! If you had been dying, I should have gone myself for the doctor.  Oo! oo! oo! oh! If I should die, nobody would be sorry.”

Abigail Anderson was not to blame for telling the truth so exactly in this last sentence.  It was an accident.  She might have recalled it but that Dr. Ketchup walked in at that moment.

He felt her pulse; looked at her tongue; said that it was heart-disease, caused by excitement.  He thought it must be religious excitement.  She should have a corn-sweat and some wafer-ash tea.  The corn-sweat would act as a tonic and strengthen the pericardium.  The wafer-ash would cause a tendency of blood to the head, and thus relieve the pressure on the juggler-vein.  Cynthy Ann listened admiringly to Dr. Ketchup’s incomprehensible, oracular utterances, and then speedily put a bushel of ear-corn in the great wash-boiler, which was already full of hot water in expectation of such a prescription, and set the wafer-ash to draw.

Julia had, up to this time, stood outside her mother’s door trembling with fear, and not daring to enter.  She longed to do something, but did not know how it would be received.  Now, while the deep, sonorous voice of Ketchup occupied the attention of all, she crept in and stood at the foot of Mrs. Anderson’s bed.  The mother, recovering from her twentieth dying spell, saw her.