“Plague?  What plague?”

“What plague, indeed?  Why the Asiatic plague that nearly depopulated London a couple of centuries ago.”

“But how does that concern us?  There is no plague here, I reckon.”

“Sh!  I’ve let it out!  Well, never mind—­just keep it to yourself.  Perhaps I oughtn’t said anything, but its bound to come out sooner or later, so what is the odds?  Old McDowells wouldn’t like me to—­to —­bother it all, I’ll jest tell the whole thing and let it go.  You see, I’ve been down to St. Louis, and I happened to run across old Dr. McDowells—­thinks the world of me, does the doctor.  He’s a man that keeps himself to himself, and well he may, for he knows that he’s got a reputation that covers the whole earth—­he won’t condescend to open himself out to many people, but lord bless you, he and I are just like brothers; he won’t let me go to a hotel when I’m in the city—­says I’m the only man that’s company to him, and I don’t know but there’s some truth in it, too, because although I never like to glorify myself and make a great to-do over what I am or what I can do or what I know, I don’t mind saying here among friends that I am better read up in most sciences, maybe, than the general run of professional men in these days.  Well, the other day he let me into a little secret, strictly on the quiet, about this matter of the plague.

“You see it’s booming right along in our direction—­follows the Gulf Stream, you know, just as all those epidemics do, and within three months it will be just waltzing through this land like a whirlwind!  And whoever it touches can make his will and contract for the funeral.  Well you can’t cure it, you know, but you can prevent it.  How?  Turnips! that’s it!  Turnips and water!  Nothing like it in the world, old McDowells says, just fill yourself up two or three times a day, and you can snap your fingers at the plague.  Sh!—­keep mum, but just you confine yourself to that diet and you’re all right.  I wouldn’t have old McDowells know that I told about it for anything—­he never would speak to me again.  Take some more water, Washington—­the more water you drink, the better.  Here, let me give you some more of the turnips.  No, no, no, now, I insist.  There, now.  Absorb those.  They’re, mighty sustaining—­brim full of nutriment—­all the medical books say so.  Just eat from four to seven good-sized turnips at a meal, and drink from a pint and a half to a quart of water, and then just sit around a couple of hours and let them ferment.  You’ll feel like a fighting cock next day.”

Fifteen or twenty minutes later the Colonel’s tongue was still chattering away—­he had piled up several future fortunes out of several incipient “operations” which he had blundered into within the past week, and was now soaring along through some brilliant expectations born of late promising experiments upon the lacking ingredient of the eye-water.  And at such a time Washington ought to have been a