Chapter IV
Father's Story
Soon after we settled in Los Angeles I was very sick, due, I fear, to the hasty swallowing of half-chewed raisins when my foraging expedition to the pantry was menaced by an approaching mother. She did not know for several hours about my disobedience of her law against “swiping” food between meals,—if I were really hungry I would be glad to eat dry bread without butter or jam,—but the punishment for sin was as sure as it was in the Sunday school books. I sat for a long, long time screwed up in a little aching knot in front of the Franklin stove before I was ready to admit an excruciating pain. I think now-a-days it would have been called appendicitis.
The doctor took heroic measures: caster oil, tiny black stinking pills, steaming flannels wrung out of boiling vinegar and applied to my shrinking abdomen; awful, thick, nasty, white, sweetish cod-liver-oil. I survived.
I was only seven, and not used to staying in bed for a month at a time, so papa, sorry for me, day by day, told me the story of his life. He told me about his home, the brick farm house at Norridgewock on the Kennebec, the same river that I had seen when I was in Maine.
