Rough-edged paper, yellowed, folded so many times that the creases shed when you touch them.
Small regular brush script. Eleven substances, the quantity written beside each in characters half the size.
It came down through the family. It has worked three times: his grandfather's chronic cough, his father's leg, and the fever he could not shift at twenty-seven.
Last autumn his wife had a cough and he took it to the herbalist to be made up.
The dispenser put her glasses on and held it under the lamp and read it twice, and then said one of these was put on the restricted list fifty years ago. You cannot get it anywhere.
He asked which one. She tapped the seventh line.
He took it home, spread it on the dining table and turned the lamp up as far as it goes.
The three characters on the seventh line are black. The strokes have clean edges.
The other ten have bled into the paper — furred at the edges, some of them blurred into a smudge.
That line was added later. He counted twice. Without it the prescription has ten.