“They was all sorry for her, but the only one that had any advice to give was Abbie Larkin, she that was Abbie Dillin’ham ’fore she married old man Larkin.  Larkin had one foot in the grave when she married him, and she managed to crowd the other one in inside of a couple of years afterward.  Abbie is a widow, of course, and she is middlin’ good-lookin’ and dresses pretty gay.  Larkin left her a little money, but I guess she’s run through most of it by this time.  The circle folks was dyin’ to talk about her, but she was always on hand so early that they hardly ever got a chance.

“Well, after supper was over, Abbie gets Hannah over in a corner, and says she: 

“‘Miss Parker,’ says she, ’here’s an advertisement I cut out of the paper and saved a-purpose for you.  I want you to look at it, but you mustn’t tell anybody I gave it to you.’

“So Hannah unfurls the piece of newspaper, and ’twas an advertisement of ‘Kill-Smudge,’ the sure cure for the tobacco habit.  You could give it to the suff’rer unbeknownst to him, in his tea or soup or somethin’, and in a couple of shakes he’d no more smoke than he’d lend money to his brother-in-law, or do any other ridic’lous thing.  There was testimonials from half a dozen women that had tried it, and everyone showed a clean bill.

“Hannah read the advertisement through twice.  ‘Well, I never!’ says she.

“‘Yes,’ says Abbie, and smiles.

“‘Of course,’ says Hannah, lookin’ scornful, ’I wouldn’t think of tryin’ the stuff, but I’ll just take this home and read it over.  It’s so curious,’ she says.

“‘Ain’t it?’ says Abbie, and smiles some more.

“So that night, when Kenelm sat by the stove, turnin’ the air blue, his sister set at the other side of the table with that advertisement hid behind the Wellmouth Advocate readin’ and thinkin’.  She wrote a letter afore she went to bed and bought a dollar’s worth of stamps at the postoffice next day.  And for a week she watched the mails the way one of these city girls does when the summer’s ’most over and eight or nine of her fellers have finished their vacations and gone back to work.

“About ten days after that Kenelm begins to feel kind of off his feed, so’s to speak.  Somethin’ seemed to ail him and he couldn’t make out what ’twas.  They’d had a good many cranberries on their bog that year and Hannah’d been cookin’ ’em up fast so’s they wouldn’t spile.  But one night she brings on a cranberry pie, and Kenelm turned up his nose at it.

“‘More of that everlastin’ sour stuff!’ he snorts.  ’I’ve et cranb’ries till my stomach’s puckered up as if it worked with a gath’rin’ string.  Take it away!  I don’t want it!’

“‘But, Kenelm, you’re always so fond of cranb’ry pie.’

“’Me?  It makes me shrivel just to look at it.  Pass that sugar bowl, so’s I can sweeten ship.’

“Next day ’twas salt fish and potatoes that wa’n’t good.  He’d been teasin’ for a salt-fish dinner for ever so long, so Hannah’d fixed up this one just to please him, but he swallered two or three knifefuls and then looked at her kind of sad and mournful.