draught, "but you'll do better the next time. It had a queer taste,
methought; or is it that my mouth is getting out of taste? Hard times it
will be for poor Aunt Kezzy, if she's to lose her taste for the medicine
that, under Providence, has saved her life for so many years."

She gave back the cup to Septimius, after looking a little curiously at the
dregs.

"It looks like bloodroot, don't it?" said she. "Perhaps it's my own fault
after all. I gathered a fresh bunch of the yarbs yesterday afternoon, and
put them to steep, and it may be I was a little blind, for it was between
daylight and dark, and the moon shone on me before I had finished. I
thought how the witches used to gather their poisonous stuff at such
times, and what pleasant uses they made of it,--but those are sinful
thoughts, Seppy, sinful thoughts! so I'll say a prayer and try to go to
sleep. I feel very noddy all at once."

Septimius drew the bedclothes up about her shoulders, for she complained of
being very chilly, and, carefully putting her stick within reach, went
down to his own room, and resumed his studies, trying to make out from
those aged hieroglyphics, to which he was now so well accustomed, what was
the precise method of making the elixir of immortality. Sometimes, as men
in deep thought do, he rose from his chair, and walked to and fro the four
or five steps or so that conveyed him from end to end of his little room.
At one of these times he chanced to look in the little looking-glass that
hung between the windows, and was startled at the paleness of his face. It
was quite white, indeed. Septimius was not in the least a foppish young
man; careless he was in dress, though often his apparel took an unsought
picturesqueness that set off his slender, agile figure, perhaps from some
quality of spontaneous arrangement that he had inherited from his Indian