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It makes me sick to use it; I feel as if the doctor was going to order me some boneset tea. Give me a good red-hot patent car-heater, that smells enough of burning iron to make your head ache in a minute, and sets your car on fire as soon as it rolls over the embankment. That's what I call comfort. A hot-water bottle shoved under your feet I should suppose I was a woman, and a feeble one at that.
The silkweed, the skull-cap, catnip, boneset, the peppermint, wild ginger, wintergreen, and scores of other plants, all gladly offered their roots, their berries, or their leaves. "Their number was so great that the little striped squirrel, who had attended both councils, was scarcely able to remember them all.
"Poor Martha," he sighed, as he turned away, "she would be fidgeted to death if she knew how wet I am. I guess I had better drink some boneset when I get home. I believe that is what she used to give me."
"I heard you moving about, and I've brought you something hot to drink," she said. "That's real good of you, Aunt Kate," was the cheerful reply. "But it's near supper-time, and I don't need it." "It's boneset tea for your cold," answered Aunt Kate, gently, and put it on the high dressing-table made of a wooden box and covered with muslin. "For your cold, Cassy," she repeated.
The wild plums is better'n any in Kentucky; and as for grapes, they're big as your thumb, and thousands, on the river. Wait till you see the plum and grape jell I could make this fall!" "Women always thinking of jell!" "But we got every herb here we need boneset and sassafras and Injun physic and bark for the fever.
For as she says to me once when we wus a talkin' it over, how every thing had happened to her that could happen to a woman, and how curious it wuz, "Yes," says she, with a axent like boneset and vinegar, "and what few things there are that hain't happened to me, has happened to my folks." And, sure enough, I couldn't dispute her.
Down-stairs McKnight was flirting with the telephone central and there was an odor of boneset tea in the air. I think Mrs. Klopton was fascinated out of her theories by the "boneset" in connection with the fractured arm. Anyhow, I held up the bag and looked at it.
"I will make you a lot of trouble," objected Miss Gray. "No, you won't," the girl of the Red Mill repeated. "Aunt Alvirah will snuggle you down between soft, fluffy blankets, and give you hot boneset tea, or 'composition, and otherwise coddle you. To-morrow morning you will feel like a new girl." "Oh, dear!" groaned Miss Gray. "I wish I were a new girl."
The remainder were of that class of illiterate and unlearning quacks who physic and blister the poor whites and negros in the country districts of the South; who believe they can stop bleeding of the nose by repeating a verse from the Bible; who think that if in gathering their favorite remedy of boneset they cut the stem upwards it will purge their patients, and if downward it will vomit them, and who hold that there is nothing so good for "fits" as a black cat, killed in the dark of the moon, cut open, and bound while yet warm, upon the naked chest of the victim of the convulsions.
"I do not remember being sick but I have heard mother say, when she or her children were sick, the white doctor who attended the Tolsons treated us and the only herbs I can recall were life-everlasting boneset and woodditney, from each of which a tea could be made. "This is about all I can recall." Maryland Sept. 7, 1937 Rogers RICHARD MACKS, Ex-slave.
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