Doctors are not of much use if you take them off the beaten track. In the face of a recognised disease—measles, pneumonia, or appendicitis, something they can look up in a book—they make some kind of fight. When they come up against anything as vague and formless as a weakness they can very rarely do anything.
"He gave her a bottle, I suppose," I said bitterly.
In Ireland we describe every medicine as a bottle and we are beginning to lose faith in bottles.
"For all the good it did her," said Cassidy, "it might as well have been water that was in it; though I will say for that bottle it smelt powerful bad when you took the cork out of it."
"I don't see," I said, "that I'm likely to be of much use."
"It could be," said Cassidy, "that if your reverence was to speak a word to her it might comfort her."
This was, of course, possible. I followed John Cassidy up the lane.
On the way to the cabin he explained more fully the nature of the weakness.
"It's been coming on her," he said, "ever since the young lad went from us. Two years ago he took the notion into his head that he'd go to America—and he went."
I knew that. We had all discussed the departure of the Cassidys' son; but he had been gone two years and I had seen Mrs. Cassidy many times
