The percentage of consumptives was enormous. Every family shuts its windows and doors for the winter and proceeds industriously to spit, and so the disease spreads.
Diphtheria patients rode and walked often for ten hours and waited in the courtyard, and people far gone with typhus staggered along in the blazing spring sun.
One jolly old ragatops with typhus arrived in the afternoon with a violent temperature, and Jo settled him comfortably in the courtyard with his head on a sink until Mrs. Berry should come in to see about taking him into the barracks. He seemed quite happy about himself, but very worried about his blind beggar brother and his two half-blind children, whose sight had been ruined by smallpox.
For the latter nothing could be done.
Another time she kept two boys waiting to see if Mrs. Berry could take them into her typhus barracks. One had scarlet fever, and the other was a young starving clerk in a galloping consumption, thirty-six hours from his home.
Afraid to raise their hopes, and not knowing if there would be room for them, Jo told them that they were to have some very strong medicine that could only be administered two hours after a dose of hot milk and biscuit (the medicine was only bovril). By this time Mrs. Berry arrived and managed to squeeze the boys in.
However, we were told to clear the hospitals, for the wounded were expected.
"What could be done with the scarlet fever boy?" At last an idea came: "The Mortuary," built by the Horse Show Judge with such joy. The mortuary that we had all gone to admire as a work of art.
But the scarlet fever boy did not seem to see it that way, for in the night he escaped, and we have never seen him since.