Phoebe fingered her brown beads and squinted at the sky through one of them. Then she pounced on another bundle and had it out of its protecting stocking before Doc could prevent her. “Digby’s Sympathetic Powder!” she said. “I never heard of it. What’s it for?”

Doc would have taken back the bundle, but Phoebe moved it beyond his reach and unknotted the string that bound it. “What’s it for, Doc?”

Doc sighed. “It’s the greatest remedy there is. It’s good for everything. There ain’t anything, hardly, that it won’t cure. It’s so powerful that if you got stuck with a bayonet, I could cure you by rubbing the bayonet with Digby’s Sympathetic Powder.”

“Did you say you could do it by rubbing the bayonet?”

Doc nodded, and the watery blue eyes that he raised to Phoebe’s were as innocent as those of a new-born babe surfeited with milk.

Phoebe had the bundle open by now. Nason and I, peering over her shoulder, saw it held a yellowish powder. Before Doc could stop her, she placed a pinch of it on her tongue. While she tasted it, she stared pensively at Doc; and Doc’s eye again roamed over the noisy throng that pressed around the beer barrel.

Strangely, then, Phoebe laughed. “Here! I’ll show you what to do!” She replaced the Digby’s Sympathetic Powder in its wrappings, took the Almanac from Doc’s smock, and neatly knotted together the stockings that held the two. Then she pushed one of the bundles under the belt of his smock, so that the two of them hung snugly against his back, a little below the level of his belt. “There! Do the same with the other two, and you’ll find ’em no harder to carry than that goose you spoke of.”

Doc rose waveringly to his feet to paw delightedly behind him. Phoebe went to Nason and hooked her finger in his belt. “Well, Steven, the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get back.” Together they went to the man with the drum, who had drunk so much beer that he had trouble finding his drumsticks.

The drum rolled twice in such a way that a thickness came into my upper chest—a thickness like wool, that seemed to keep the air from passing into me. The crowd fell silent, except for a drunken man inside the ordinary, who kept bawling that even though a lobster pot should be coopered around his head and shoulders, he could whip King George without half trying; and the faces around me grew vacant, as is the habit of New Englanders when their feelings are in danger of becoming noticeable.