THAT MYSTERIOUS DAGUERREOTYPE SALOON For two years our young neighbor Catherine had been carrying on a little industry that had proved fairly lucrative--namely, gathering and curing wild herbs and selling them to drug stores in Portland.

Her grandmother had taught her how to cure and press the herbs.

One season she sold seventy dollars' worth.
Catherine took many long jaunts to gather her herbs--thoroughwort, goldthread, catnip, comfrey, skullcap, pennyroyal, lobelia, peppermint, old-man's-root, snakehead and others of greater or less medicinal value.
She soon came to know where all those various wild plants grew for miles round.

Naturally she wished to keep her business for herself and was rather chary about telling others where the herbs she collected grew.
She had heard that thoroughwort was growing in considerable quantity in the old pastures at "Dresser's Lonesome." She did not like to go up there alone, however, for the place was ten or eleven miles away, and the road that led to it ran for most of the distance through deep woods; a road that once proceeded straight through to Canada, but had long since been abandoned.

Years before, a young man named Abner Dresser had cleared a hundred acres of land up there and built a house and a large barn; but his wife had been so lonely--there was no neighbor within ten miles--that he had at last abandoned the place.
Finally Catherine asked my cousin Theodora to go up to "Dresser's Lonesome" with her and offered to share the profits of the trip.