"No—no, they won't!" she answers, nervously; "it is better to be on the safe side."
"Would you like a night-light, miss?"
"Oh no, no! they make the corners of the room blacker than ever, and they cast such odd shadows. I'm so afraid of the dark," she ends, shuddering.
"I'm afraid you don't sleep well, 'm?"
"Not very. By-the-by" (with a sudden inspiration), "have you got anything that you could give me to make me sleep—any opiate of any kind?"
"I've got a little laudanum, ma'am, that Mrs. Franklin give me last week when I had a bad face."
"Fetch it me," she cries, eagerly; "that is, if you don't want it yourself. It is very foolish of me," she says, looking rather ashamed, "but I cannot sleep for fright."
The servant goes, and presently returns with a small dark blue bottle.
"About how much ought one to take, I wonder?" Esther says, holding it up between herself and the firelight.
"If you have never been used to take it before, I should think two or three drops would be hample, 'm; I hope, 'm" (with a little anxiety in her florid plebeian face), "as you'll be careful not to take a hoverdose, or you might chance never to wake up again: I knew a young person as took it by mistake for 'black dose'—it was the fault of the chemist's young man—and in an hour she was a corpse; they said as she had took enough to kill ten men."