Jack Finney had grown fond of this odd girl through his dealings with her, for she had an endearing sort of charm. In his travels, he always looked for editions of books she might favor. He was a Cornishman who’d come to this country with nothing, after his wife and child had died of the pox. He’d wanted to be as far away from England as possible, but now he felt lost in this vast, flat land of Brooklyn, and it was a pleasure to speak to someone with whom he felt at ease. As far as he could tell, the girl was an outcast just as he was, a loner by nature or by design. Though she was now eleven, and had lived at the end of the world for nearly three years, she was less a child than anyone of her age the peddler had ever seen. She spoke with assurance and without the vanity and self-centeredness of childhood. Faith bit her lip when she was thinking and narrowed her eyes, and now she paid strict attention to the concoction on the stove.

“It’s a remedy,” she told Jack Finney. “If you let me have one of your glass jars, I’ll tell you the secret.”

She went on to teach him how to cure a cough. He wished he’d been aware of this cure when he’d had a child of his own who’d been ill with a similar disease, heartbreaking to watch when at the very last his daughter could not draw a single breath.

Finney gave Faith a jar with a cork top for her mixture. “How did you learn all this?” he asked.

Faith shrugged. She remembered bits and pieces, and sometimes whole spells, but the truth was, she’d been born with the knowledge. She returned to the house where she’d seen the crying woman, then knocked at the door and told the distraught mother that a spoonful of the tonic given twice a day would stave off the boy’s coughs. The woman was suspicious, but after Faith went on her way, she tested the cure by tasting a spoonful herself. There were no ill effects, so she gave a dose to her son. His coughing stopped that very night, and before long he was out and about, healthy as anyone.