"Of course I can give something that will keep her from suffering like this." The leather bag now disclosed its wonderworking phials; fifteen drops of a yellowish drug were diluted with two fingers of water, and the sick woman, lifted up in bed, managed to swallow this with sharp cries of pain.

Then there was apparently nothing more to be done; the men fit their pipes, and the doctor, with his feet against the stove, held forth as to his professional labours and the cures he had wrought.
"Illnesses like these," said he, "where one cannot discover precisely what is the matter, are more baffling to a doctor than the gravest disorders--like pneumonia now, or even typhoid fever which carry off three-quarters of the people hereabouts who do not die of old age.

Well, typhoid and pneumonia, I cure these every month in the year.

You know Viateur Tremblay, the postmaster at St.Henri ..." He seemed a little hurt that Madame Chapdelaine should be the victim of an obscure malady, hard to diagnose, and had not been taken down with one of the two complaints he was accustomed to treat with such success, and he gave an account by chapter and verse of the manner in which he had cured the postmaster of St.Henri.From that they passed on to the country news--news carried by word of mouth from house to house around Lake St.John, and greeted a thousandfold more eagerly than tidings of wars and famines, since the gossipers always manage to connect it with friend or relative in a country where all ties of kinship, near or far, are borne scrupulously in mind.
Madame Chapdelaine ceased moaning and seemed to be asleep.

The doctor, considering that he had done all that was expected of him, for the evening at least, knocked the ashes out of his pipe and rose to go.
"I shall sleep at Honfleur," said he, "I suppose your horse is fit to take me so far?
There is no need for you to come, I know the road.