“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Amelia, for she had fallen with her fingers on a four-leaved clover.
She put it behind her back, for the old tinker dwarf was coming up to her, wiping the mud from his face with his leathern apron.
“Now for our dance!” he shrieked. “And I have made up my mind—partners now and partners always. You are incomparable. For three hundred years I have not met with your equal.”
But Amelia held the four-leaved clover above her head, and cried from her very heart—“I want to go home!”
The dwarf gave a hideous yell of disappointment, and at this instant the stock came stumbling head over heels into the midst, crying—“Oh! the pills, the powders, and the draughts! oh, the lotions and embrocations! oh, the blisters, the poultices, and the plasters! men may well be so short-lived!”
And Amelia found herself in bed in her own home.
AT HOME AGAIN.
By the side of Amelia’s bed stood a little table, on which were so many big bottles of medicine, that Amelia smiled to think of all the stock must have had to swallow during the month past. There was an open Bible on it too, in which Amelia’s mother was reading, whilst tears trickled slowly down her pale cheeks. The poor lady looked so thin and ill, so worn with sorrow and watching, that Amelia’s heart smote her, as if some one had given her a sharp blow.
“Mamma, mamma! Mother, my dear, dear, mother!”
The tender, humble, loving tone of voice was so unlike Amelia’s old imperious snarl, that her mother hardly recognized it; and when she saw Amelia’s eyes full of intelligence instead of the delirium of fever, and that (though older and thinner and rather pale) she looked wonderfully well, the poor worn-out lady could hardly restrain herself from falling into hysterics for very joy.