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John looked after me carefully. After I had evinced so much interest in his White Orpington chicken he tried his best to divert my mind, and was particular to lock his hen house of nights. Gradually the tonic mountain air, the wholesome food, and the daily walks among the hills so alleviated my malady that I became utterly wretched and despondent. I heard of a country doctor who lived in the mountains nearby. I went to see him and told him the whole story. He was a gray-bearded man with clear, blue, wr inkled eyes, in a home-made suit of gray jeans.

In order to save time I diagnosed my case, touched my nose with my right forefinger, struck myself below the knee to make my foot kick, sounded my chest, stuck out my tongue, and asked him the price of cemetery lots in Pineville.

He lit his pipe and looked at me for about three minutes. “Brother,” he said, after a while, “you are in a mighty bad way. There’s a chance for you to pull through, but it’s a mighty slim one.”

“What can it be?” I asked eagerly. “I have taken arsenic and gold, phosphorus, exercise, nux vomica, hydrotherapeutic baths, rest, excitement, codein, and aromatic spirits of ammonia. Is there anything left in the pharmacopoeia?”

“Somewhere in these mountains,” said the doctor, “there’s a plant growing — a flowering plant that’ll cure you, and it’s about the only thing that will. It’s of a kind that’s as old as the world; but of late it’s powerful scarce and hard to find. You and I will have to hunt it up. I’m not engaged in active practice now: I’m getting along in years; but I’ll take your case. You’ll have to come every day in the afternoon and help me hunt for this plant till we find it. The city doctors may know a lot about new scientific things, but they don’t know much about the cures that nature carries around in her saddlebags.”

So every day the old doctor and I hunted the cure-all plant among the mountains and valleys of the Blue Ridge. Together we toiled up steep heights so slippery with fallen autumn leaves that we had to catch every sapling and branch within our reach to save us from falling. We waded through gorges and chasms, breast-deep with laurel and ferns; we followed the banks of mountain streams for miles; we wound our way like Indians through brakes of pine — road side, hill side, river side, mountain side we explored in our search for the miraculous plant.

As the old doctor said, it must have grown scarce and hard to find. But we followed our quest. Day by day we plumbed the valleys, scaled the heights, and tramped the plateaus in search of the miraculous plant. Mountain-bred, he never seemed to tire. I often reached home too fatigued to do anything except fall into bed and sleep until morning. This we kept up for a month.

One evening after I had returned from a six-mile tramp with the old doctor, Amaryllis and I took a little walk under the trees near the road. We looked at the mountains drawing their royal-purple robes around them for their night’s repose.

“I’m glad you’re well again,” she said. “When you first came you frightened me. I thought you were really ill.”

“Well again!” I almost shrieked. “Do you know that I have only one chance in a thousand to live?”

Amaryllis looked at me in surprise. “Why,” said she, “you are as strong as one of the plough-mules, you sleep ten or twelve hours every night, and you are eating us out of house and home. What more do you want?”

“I tell you,” said I, “that unless we find the magic — that is, the plant we are looking for — in time, nothing can save me. The doctor tells me so.”