“So Hannah was set back a couple of rows, but she wa’n’t discouraged—­not by a forty fathom.  She got after her brother mornin’, noon and night about the smokin’ habit.  The most provokin’ part of it, so she said, was that he always agreed with her.

“‘It’s ruinin’ your health,’ she’d say.

“‘Yes,’ says Kenelm, lookin’ solemn, ’I cal’late that’s so.  I’ve been feelin’ poorly for over a year now.  Worries me consider’ble.  Pass me that plug on the top of the clock, won’t you, Hannah?’

“Now what can you do with a feller like that?

“She couldn’t start him with fussin’ about his health, so she swung over on a new tack and tried her own.  She said so much smoke in the house was drivin’ her into consumption, and she worked up a cough that was a reg’lar graveyard quickstep.  I heard her practicin’ it once, and, I swan, there was harps and halos all through it!

“That cough made Kenelm set up and take notice; and no wonder.  He listened to a hundred or so of Hannah’s earthquakes, and then he got up and pranced out of the house.  When he came back the doctor was with him.

“Now, this wa’n’t exactly what his sister was lookin’ for.  She didn’t want to see the doctor.  But Kenelm said she’d got to have her lungs sounded right off, and he guessed they’d have to use a deep-sea lead, ’cause that cough seemed to come from the foundations.  He waylaid the doctor after the examination was over and asked all kinds of questions.  The doctor tried to keep a straight face, but I guess Kenelm smelt a rat.

“Anyway, Hannah coughed for a day or two more, and then her brother come totin’ in a big bottle of med’cine.

“‘There!’ he says.  ‘That’ll fix you!’

“‘Where’d you get it?’ says she.

“‘Down to Henry Tubman’s,’ he says.

“‘Henry Tubman!  What on earth!  Why, Henry Tubman’s a horse doctor!’

“‘I know he is,’ says Kenelm, solemn as a roostin’ pullet, ’but we’ve been fishin’ with the wrong bait.  ‘Tain’t consumption that’s ailin’ you, Hannah; you’ve got the heaves.’

“So Hannah didn’t cough much more, ’cause, when she did, Kenelm would trot out the bottle of horse med’cine, and chuck overboard a couple of barrels of sarcasm.  She tried openin’ all the windows, sayin’ she needed fresh air, but he locked himself up in the kitchen and filled that so full of smoke that you had to navigate it by dead reckonin’—­couldn’t see to steer.  So she was about ready to give up; somethin’ that anybody but a stubborn critter like her would have done long afore.

“But one afternoon she was down to the sewin’ circle, and the women folks there, havin’ finished pickin’ to pieces the characters of the members not on hand, started in to go on about the revivals and how much good they was doin’.  ’Most everybody had some relation, if ‘twa’n’t nothin’ more’n a husband, that had stopped smokin’ and chewin’.  Everybody had some brand from the burnin’ to brag about—­everybody but Hannah; she could only set there and say she’d done her best, but that Kenelm still herded with the goats.