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After asking me if I had ever had a grand uncle with curvature of the spine or a cousin with swelled ankles, the two doctors retired to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath tub for their consultation. I ate an apple, and gazed first at my finger and then across the bay.

The doctors came out looking grave. More: they looked tombstones and Tennessee-papers-please-copy. They wrote out a diet list to which I was to be restricted. It had everything that I had ever heard of to eat on it, except snails. And I never eat a snail unless it overtakes me and bites me first.

“You must follow this diet strictly,” said the doctors.

“I’d follow it a mile if I could get one-tenth of what’s on it,” I answered.

“Of next importance,” they went on, “is outdoor air and exercise. And here is a prescription that will be of great benefit to you.”

Then all of us took something. They took their hats, and I took my departure.

I went to a druggist and showed him the prescription.

“It will be $2.87 for an ounce bottle,” he said.

“Will you give me a piece of your wrapping cord?” said I.

I made a hole in the prescription, ran the cord through it, tied it around my neck, and tucked it inside. All of us have a little superstition, and mine runs to a confidence in amulets.

Of course there was nothing the matter with me, but I was very ill. I couldn’t work, sleep, eat, or bowl. The only way I could get any sympathy was to go without shaving for four days. Even then somebody would say: “Old man, you look as hardy as a pine knot. Been up for a jaunt in the Maine woods, eh?”

Then, suddenly, I remembered that I must have outdoor air and exercise. So I went down South to John’s. John is an approximate relative by verdict of a preacher standing with a little book in his hands in a bower of chrysanthemums while a hundred thousand people looked on. John has a country house seven miles from Pineville. It is at an altitude and on the Blue Ridge Mountains in a state too dignified to be dragged into this controversy. John is mica, which is more valuable and clearer than gold.

He met me at Pineville, and we took the trolley car to his home. It is a big, neighbourless cottage on a hill surrounded by a hundred mountains. We got off at his little private station, where John’s family and Amaryllis met and greeted us. Amaryllis looked at me a trifle anxiously.

A rabbit came bounding across the hill between us and the house. I threw down my suit-case and pursued it hotfoot. After I had run twenty yards and seen it disappear, I sat down on the grass and wept disconsolately.

“I can’t catch a rabbit any more,” I sobbed. “I’m of no further use in the world. I may as well be dead.”

“Oh, what is it — what is it, Brother John?” I heard Amaryllis say.

“Nerves a little unstrung,” said John, in his calm way. “Don’t worry. Get up, you rabbit-chaser, and come on to the house before the biscuits get cold.” It was about twilight, and the mountains came up nobly to Miss Murfree’s descriptions of them.

Soon after dinner I announced that I believed I could sleep for a year or two, including legal holidays. So I was shown to a room as big and cool as a flower garden, where there was a bed as broad as a lawn. Soon afterward the remainder of the household retired, and then there fell upon the land a silence.

I had not heard a silence before in years. It was absolute. I raised myself on my elbow and listened to it. Sleep! I thought that if I only could hear a star twinkle or a blade of grass sharpen itself I could compose myself to rest. I thought once that I heard a sound like the sail of a catboat flapping as it veered about in a breeze, but I decided that it was probably only a tack in the carpet. Still I listened.