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Until that point, all illnesses had been treated with herbal cures or incantations, and all toothaches were simply cured by extraction, but now ambitious young men among the families of Plowright, Swain, Chism and Whitter, who had been taught by Boone Harrison in their childhood to read and still remembered how, sent off to St. Louis for correspondence courses in medicine and dentistry, studied their lessons diligently, practiced on the idiots until they had ironed out the kinks in their practice, then hung out their shingles on small new white-painted buildings up and down Main Street. The idiots’ other problem was that because of the population explosion they were crowded off of Lum’s store porch and lost their favorite gathering place. Restless, they wandered, and discovered an orchard, and ate green apples, and had to be taken back to the doctors.

There were so many people in Stay More that nobody could keep track of them all. A few got lost, and nobody noticed. John Ingledew, if pressed, could not tell how many brothers and sisters he had, nor, in fact, how many children he had. (He had ten, all told, each conceived in his sleep, except for one, who was, as we will learn, conceived in the sleep of his brother Willis.) There were times when he could not even find his wife, Sirena. He would hear her, in some other room, humming to herself, or sneezing, or just breathing, but he could not find her. This contributed to his constant expression of foreboding, which people associated with the childhood nickname he had never outgrown, “Doomy.” As his sister Perlina expressed it to her husband, Brother Stapleton, “Doomy allus looks like the world’s comin to a end any minute now.” This air made him the less effective of the two brothers who clerked at their Uncle Lum’s store; in fact, anybody coming to the store would always rather have Willis wait upon them, and would turn to John only if Willis and Lum were both very busy. John was sensitive about this, and it further affected his facial expression. No doubt John had a good heart and was a good husband (when he could find her) and a reasonably good father, but in appearance, although he was just as handsome as any other Ingledew, he was the most disagreeable of them all, and for this reason I am, and always have been, prejudiced against him.

When Lum Ingledew died, he willed his store to Willis, not even mentioning John, and this further affected John’s mien. Lum Ingledew died during an epidemic of typhoid fever, the first corrective measure that Nature took against the overpopulation. This is not to suggest that Nature singled out Lum Ingledew, but that he was haplessly one of many random persons who were put beneath the earth in order to make more room on top of it. Before Stay More got its doctors, the worst afflictions that anyone got were pneumonia and the frakes, neither of which is contagious, and nobody ever died of the latter. But after the doctors hung their shingles, there were epidemics of, successively: typhoid fever, shingles, tuberculosis, influenza, meningitis, poliomyelitis, and yellow fever. The doctors were able to identify each one of these, but they were not able to cure any of them. They prescribed and sold an esoteric pharmacopoeia that was of no earthly use. The lucky persons were those whose grandmothers insisted on administering the old remedies: slippery-elm bark tonic, chicken blood and cat blood, ground roots and herbs. The unlucky ones, or those who did not have grandmothers, like Lum Ingledew, perished. Even some who had grandmothers perished. John and Sirena Ingledew lost two of their children. Perlina and Long Jack Stapleton lost three of theirs. Denton and Monroe Ingledew gave up farming and turned to gravedigging and were employed so steadily they both got the frakes. The doctors too were working so hard they both got the frakes, and treated one another, without success. One by one the idiots died and could not grieve for each other, until there was only one left, and he, in his