HOW POLLY WENT HOME
"We'll have to move poor Polly, if she lives thro' the night," the nurse said to the house doctor in the hospital that night. "She is making all the patients homesick. To hear her calling for her mother or for 'someone from 'ome' is hard on the sick and well."
"What are her chances do you think?" the doctor asked gravely.
He was a wiry little man with a face like leather, but his touch brought healing and his presence, hope.
"She is dying of homesickness as well as typhoid," the nurse said sadly, "and she seems so anxious to get better, poor thing! She often says 'I can't die miss, for what'll happen mother.' But for the last two days, in her delirium, she seems to be worrying more about her work and her flowers. I think they were pretty hard people she lived with. 'Surely she'll praise me this time,' she often says, 'I've tried my 'ardest.' The strenuous life has been too much for poor Polly. Listen to her now!"
Polly was singing. Clear and steady and sweet, her voice rang over the quiet ward, and many a fevered face was raised to listen. Polly's mind was wandering in the shadows, but she still sang the songs of home in a strange land:
Down by the biller there grew a green willer
A weeping all night with the bank for a piller.
And over and over again she sang with a wavering cadence, incoherently sometimes, but always with tender pleading, something about "where the stream was a-flowin', the gentle kine lowin', and over my grave keep the green willers growin'."
"It is pathetic to hear her," the nurse said, "and now listen to her asking about her poppies."
"In the box, miss; I brought the seed hacross the hocean, and they wuz beauties, they wuz wot came hup. They'll be noddin' and wavin' now red and 'andsome, if she hasn't cut them. She wouldn't cut them, would she, miss? She couldn't 'ave the 'eart, I think."