“My uncle wants you to come to Westways to-morrow and doctor old Josiah’s rheumatism.”

“I’ll come.”

“He wants you to look after Peter Lamb.  He’s been drinking again.”

“What! that whisky-rotted scamp.  It’s pure waste of time.  How the same milk came to feed the Squire and that beast the Lord knows.  He has no more morals than a tom-cat.  I’ll come, but it’s waste of good doctoring.”  Here he turned his rising temper on Tom.  “You and my boy have been having a fight.  You licked him and saved me the trouble.  I heard from Mr. Rivers what Tom said.”

“It was no one’s business but Tom’s and mine,” returned John much amused to know that the peaceful rector must have watched the fight and overheard what caused it.  Tom scowled, and the peacemaking old doctor got up, adding, “Be more gentle with Tom next time.”

Tom knew better than to reply and went back to pill-making furious and humiliated.

“Good-bye, John,” said the Doctor.  “I’ll see the Squire after I have doctored that whisky sponge.”  Then John rode home on Dixy.

CHAPTER VII

Before the period of which I write, the county and town had unfailingly voted the Democratic ticket.  But for half a decade the unrest of the cities reflected in the journals had been disturbing the minds of country communities in the Middle States.  In the rural districts of Pennsylvania there had been very little actively hostile sentiment about slavery, but the never ending disputes over Kansas had at last begun to weaken party ties, and more and more to direct opinion on to the originating cause of trouble.

The small voting population of Westways had begun to suspect of late that James Penhallow’s unwillingness to discuss politics meant some change in his fidelity to the party of which Buchanan was the candidate.  What Mrs. Ann felt she had rather freely allowed to be known.  The little groups which were apt to gather about the grocer’s barrels at evening discussed the grave question of the day with an interest no previous presidential canvass had caused, and this side eddy of quiet village life was now agreeably disturbed by the great currents of national politics.  Westways began to take itself seriously, as little towns will at times, and to ask how this man or that would vote at the coming election in November.  The old farmers who from his youth still called the Squire “James” were Democrats.  Swallow, the only lawyer the town possessed, was silent, which was felt as remarkable in a man who usually talked much more than occasion demanded and wore a habit-mask of good-fellowship, which had served to deceive many a blunt old farmer, but not James Penhallow.