WITCH WINNIE’S MYSTERY.
CHAPTER I.
THE FIRST ESCAPADE OF THE SEASON.
Girls!” Winnie exclaimed excitedly as we entered our study parlor after recitation, “I am wild with curiosity to know what they are doing in the hospital. All the morning, while I have been trying to study, there has been the greatest thumping and bumping going on in there. I wonder whether they are chaining down an insane patient, or if the ghostly nurses are having a war dance.”
“Why didn’t you look and see?” Cynthia Vaughn asked, pointing to the transom over a locked door, which formerly opened from our parlor into the hospital ward.
Madame had made abundant provision for sickness in the original arrangement of the school building. A large sky-lighted room had been set apart as an infirmary, and a little suite of rooms in the great tower adjoining as the physician’s quarters. But it was rare indeed that any one was ill at Madame’s, and when a pupil was taken sick, her parents usually took her home at once. So the doctor, having nothing to do but to hear the recitations in physiology, preferred not to reside in the school building, and the pretty suite of rooms, consisting of a parlor and three bedrooms, was assigned to us, and the hospital proper was used as a trunk room. Winnie always maintained that ghosts of medical students experimented there in the night watches on imaginary cases of vivisection, that corpses were embalmed, and shrieks and howls were to be heard, in the wee small hours, while phantom lights fumed blue on the other side of the transom, and sickly odors of ether and other drugs penetrated through the keyhole. We all laughed at Winnie’s phantasms, but there were none of us so brave as to care to visit that room after nightfall. The trunks looked too much like coffins, and there were dresses of Madame’s sewed up in bags made of sheets, and suspended from the roof, which had the uncanny look of corpses of people who had hanged themselves.
It was broad daylight now, and we were not at all nervous, and Cynthia remarked scornfully, “Winnie has told us so many of her bug-a-boo stories that she has come to actually believe in them herself. She dare not for her life look through that transom to see what occasions the noise in the hospital.”
“You dare me to do it?” Winnie asked, confronting Cynthia with flashing eyes.