it! Turnips and water! Nothing like it in the world, old McDowells

says, just fill yourself up two or three times a day, and you can snap

your fingers at the plague. Sh!--keep mum, but just you confine yourself

to that diet and you're all right. I wouldn't have old McDowells know

that I told about it for anything--he never would speak to me again.

Take some more water, Washington--the more water you drink, the better.

Here, let me give you some more of the turnips. No, no, no, now, I

insist. There, now. Absorb those. They're, mighty sustaining--brim

full of nutriment--all the medical books say so. Just eat from four to

seven good-sized turnips at a meal, and drink from a pint and a half to a

quart of water, and then just sit around a couple of hours and let them

ferment. You'll feel like a fighting cock next day."

Fifteen or twenty minutes later the Colonel's tongue was still chattering

away--he had piled up several future fortunes out of several incipient

"operations" which he had blundered into within the past week, and was

now soaring along through some brilliant expectations born of late

promising experiments upon the lacking ingredient of the eye-water.

And at such a time Washington ought to have been a rapt and enthusiastic

listener, but he was not, for two matters disturbed his mind and

distracted his attention. One was, that he discovered, to his confusion

and shame, that in allowing himself to be helped a second time to the

turnips, he had robbed those hungry children. He had not needed the

dreadful "fruit," and had not wanted it; and when he saw the pathetic

sorrow in their faces when they asked for more and there was no more to

give them, he hated himself for his stupidity and pitied the famishing

118

The Gilded Age