I paid no attention to the request, and gained my own apartment very much out of breath, but in a few minutes the little man returned and said that the girl was having a fit. So I followed him again, This time there was no mystery; I knew only too well that there had been a quarrel. When I returned to the bedroom the fair Hulda lay stretched upon the floor in what appeared to be a swoon. There was a black girl bathing her forehead with bayrum, and all about was dire confusion.
“You had no right to tell me to cook that cabbage, and you had no right to throw away that sauerkraut,” said the negro servant, as she helped me to lift her mistress from the floor to the bed.
“Shure, there’s nothing in the world as bad for a woman in her condition as sauerkraut,” answered the little man, meekly.
On hearing the words “sauerkraut” Hulda became quite hysterical and began to kick and to abuse the “architect.”
“What am I to do at all, at all?” said he, as he endeavored to stroke her head, in return for which she pinched and tried to bite him. “God be praised and glorified,” ejaculated the husband. “I thry to plaze the creature, an’ she has everything that I can get for her. Say, Hulda, is it your brother-in-law you want?”
THE CANAL ZONE ARCHITECT’S WEDDING
(PART IV.)
T this point there came an interruption in the person of the doctor who had been called. He was very red in the face, and as he prepared to take Hulda’s temperature he asked of her husband, “What is all this ruction about? How many more times must I witness these scenes? Why don’t you give the girl up? Some day she’ll stick a knife in your back, and then she will be sent to prison for life.”
“Glory be to God!” shouted the “architect”. “Ain’t the woman me wife?”
“You ought to be ashamed to tell it,” said the doctor. “You, with one leg in the grave and the other on the brink. I am going to send her to the hospital now, and you are to leave her there. The girl is too young to be married to an old fellow like you.”