One sister had married and settled in her home near by, and a wife had come into my eldest brother’s home. Mrs. Larned, the widow to whose assistance my father had gone in her early desolation, had found her children now so well grown as to make it advisable to remove to one of the factory villages, where she became a popular boarding house keeper, and her children operatives in the mill.
Thus, I was again left to myself. The schools were not the best, but all that could be done for me, in or out of them, was done. I had been especially well taught to sew and liked it, but knitting was beyond me. I could not be held to it, and it was given up.
Through the confirmed invalidism of my elder sister, Dorothea, I lost her beautiful guidance, but the watchful care of my younger sister, now Mrs. Vassall, was truly pathetic. She never lost sight of my welfare, and her fine literary taste was a constant inspiration.
While thus in the midst of my various pursuits and vocations, an accidental turn in my wheel of fortune changed my entire course (for a time at least) and how much bearing, if any, it may have had on the future, I have never been able to determine. I have spoken of the younger of my two brothers, of the firm of S. & D. Barton, as a fine horseman. He was more than that. In these days he would have been an athlete. The two men were but two years apart in age, of fine disposition and excellent physical strength, integrity and courage; of fine disposition and equable temper; yet neither of them men with whom an opponent would carelessly or tauntingly covet an encounter. The younger, David, from his physical activity and daring, was always selected for any feat of danger to be performed.
These were days when even buildings were “raised by hand.” All the neighborhood was expected to participate in a “raising.” Upon one occasion, an uncommonly large barn, with what was then still more uncommon, a cellar beneath, was to be raised. The rafters must be affixed to the ridgepole, and David Barton was assigned to this duty. While in its performance, a timber on which he was standing, having been weakened by an unobserved knot, suddenly gave way, and he fell directly to the first floor, striking on his feet on another timber near the bottom of the cellar. Without falling he leaped to the ground, and after a few breathless minutes declared himself unhurt, but was not permitted to return aloft. It was spoken of as a “remarkable adventure,” “a wonderful escape,” etc., and for a few days all went well, with the exception of a slight and quite unaccustomed headache, which continued to increase as the July weather progressed. At length he showed symptoms of fever; the family physician was called, and here commenced a system of medical treatment quite unknown to our physicians of the present day, other than as results of historical research and milestones of scientific advancement.
He was pronounced in a “settled fever,” which must not be “broken up,” and could only be held in check by reducing the strength of the patient. He had “too much blood,” was “too vigorous,” “just the patient for a fever to ‘go hard with,’” it was said. Accordingly, the blood was taken from time to time, as long as it seemed safe to do so. The terrible pain in the head continued and blisters were applied to all possible places, in the hope of withdrawing the pain. Sleepless, restless, in agony both physical and mental, his case grew desperate. He had been my ideal from earliest memory. I was distressed beyond measure at his condition. I had been his little protégée, his companion, and in his nervous wretchedness he clung to me. Thus, from the first days and nights of illness, I remained near his side. The fever ran on and over all the traditional turning points, seven, fourteen, twenty-one days. I could not be taken away from him except by compulsion, and he was unhappy until my return. I learned to take all directions for his medicines from his physician (who had eminent counsel) and to administer them like a genuine nurse.
My little hands became schooled to the handling of the great, loathsome, crawling leeches which were at first so many snakes to me, and no fingers could so painlessly dress the angry blisters; and thus it came about, that I was the accepted and acknowledged nurse of a man almost too ill to recover.
Finally, as the summer passed, the fever gave way, and for a wonder the patient did not. No physician will doubt that I had given him poison enough to have killed him many times over, if suitably administered with that view. He will also understand the condition in which the patient was left. They had certainly succeeded in reducing his strength.
Late in the autumn he stood on his feet for the first time since July. Still sleepless, nervous, cold, dyspeptic—a mere wreck of his former self. None were so disturbed over his condition as his kind-hearted, and for those days, skillful physicians, who had exhausted their knowledge and poured out their sympathy and care like water, on the patient who, for his manliness and bravery, they had come to respect, and for his suffering learned to love with a parent’s tenderness.
It now became a matter of time. Councils of physicians for twenty miles around sat in judgment on the case. They could only recommend; and more blisters, setons and various methods of external irritation for the withdrawal of internal pain followed, from month to month and season to season. All these were my preferred care.