James obeyed.  As he worked filling the bottles he heard dimly Gordon’s voice talking to Clemency on the other side of the wall.  The girl seemed to be expostulating.

When Doctor Gordon returned Aaron was at his heels with an immense bottle containing a small quantity of red fluid.  “S’pose you’ll want this filled?” he said to Gordon with a grin which only disturbed for a second his rotary jaws.

“Oh, yes, of course,” replied Gordon, “we want the aqua.”

James stared at him as he poured a little red-colored liquid from one of the bottles on the shelves into the big one.  “Now fill it up from the pump, and put it in the buggy; be sure the cork is in tight,” he said to Aaron.

Gordon looked laughingly at James when the man had gone.  “I infer that you are wondering what ‘aqua’ may be,” he said.

“I was brought up to think it was water,” said James.

“So it is, water pure and simple, with a little coloring matter thrown in.  Bless you, boy, the people around here want their medicines by the quart, and if they had them by the quart, good-by to the doctor’s job, and ho for the undertaker!  So the doctor is obliged to impose upon the credulity of the avariciously innocent, and dilute the medicine.  Bless you, I have patients who would accuse me of cheating if I prescribed less than a cupful of medicine at a time.  They have to be humored.  After all, they are a harmless, good lot, but stiffened with hereditary ideas, worse than by rheumatism.  If I should give a few drops in half a glass of water, and order a teaspoonful at a time, I should fly in the face of something which no mortal man can conquer, sheer heredity.  The grandfathers and great-grandfathers of these people took their physic on draft, the children must do likewise.  Sometimes I even think the medicine would lose its effect if taken in any other way.  Nobody can estimate the power of a fixed idea upon the body.  All the same, it is a confounded nuisance carrying around the aqua.  I will confess, although I see the necessity of yielding, that I have less patience with men’s stiff-necked stupidity than I have with their sins.”

James drove all the morning with Doctor Gordon about the New Jersey country.  It was a moist, damp day, such as sometimes comes even in winter.  It was a dog day with an atmosphere slightly cooler than that of midsummer.  Overcoats were oppressive, the horses steamed.  The roads were deep with red mud, which clogged the wheels and made the hoofs of the horses heavy.  “It’s a damned soil,” said Doctor Gordon.  This morning after appearing somewhat saturnine at breakfast, he was again in his unnatural, rollicking mood.  He hailed everybody whom he met.  He joked with the patients and their relatives in the farmhouses, approached through cart-tracks of mire, and fluttered about by chickens, quacking geese, and dead leaves.  Now and then, stately ranks of turkeys charged in line of battle upon the muddy buggy, and the team,