“We’re had strangers here in this HOtel,” Mr. Wackernagel began to brag, while he industriously ate of his fried sausage and fried potatoes, “from as fur away as Illinois yet!  And from as fur south as down in Maine!  Yes, indeed!  Ain’t, mom?” he demanded of his wife.

“Och, yes, many’s the strange meals I cooked a’ready in this house.  One week I cooked forty strange meals; say not, Abe?” she returned.

“Yes, I mind of that week.  It was Mrs. Johnson and her daughter we had from Illinois and Mrs. Snyder from Maine,” Abe explained to Mr. Fairchilds.  “And them Johnsons stayed the whole week.”

“They stopped here while Mr. Johnson went over the county sellin’ milk-separators,” added Mrs. Wackernagel.  “And Abe he was in Lancaster that week, and the Doc he was over to East Donegal, and there was no man here except only us ladies!  Do you mind, Rebecca?”

Eebecca nodded, her mouth too full for utterance.

“Mrs. Johnson she looked younger than her own daughter yet,” Mrs. Wackernagel related, with animation, innocent of any suspicion that the teacher might not find the subject of Mrs. Johnson as absorbing as she found it.

“There is nothing like good health as a preserver of youth,” responded Fairchilds.

“HOtel-keepin’ didn’t pay till we got the license,” Mr. Wackernagel chatted confidentially to the stranger.  “Mom, to be sure, she didn’t favor my havin’ a bar, because she belonged to meetin’.  But I seen I couldn’t make nothin’ if I didn’t.  It was never no temptation to me—­I was always among the whisky and I never got tight oncet.  And it ain’t the hard work farmin’ was.  I had to give up followin’ farmin’.  I got it so in my leg.  Why, sometimes I can’t hardly walk no more.”

“And can’t your doctor cure you?” Fairchilds asked, with a curious glance at the unkempt little man across the table.

“Och, yes, he’s helped me a heap a’ready.  Him he’s as good a doctor as any they’re got in Lancaster even!” was the loyal response.  “Here a couple months back, a lady over in East Donegal Township she had wrote him a letter over here, how the five different kinds of doses where he give her daughter done her so much good, and she was that grateful, she sayed she just felt indebted fur a letter to him!  Ain’t, Doc?  She sayed now her daughter’s engaged to be married and her mind’s more settled—­and to be sure, that made somepin too.  Yes, she sayed her gettin’ engaged done her near as much good as the five different kind of doses done her.”

“Are you an Allopath?” Fairchilds asked the doctor.

“I’m a Eclectic,” he responded glibly.  “And do you know, Teacher, I’d been practisin’ that there style of medicine fur near twelve years before I knowed it was just to say the Eclectic School, you understand.”

“Like Moliere’s prose-writer!” remarked the teacher, then smiled at himself for making such an allusion in such a place.