"O, dear!" thought Dotty, as she lay through the long afternoon, wakeful and feverish, "I should think there was a drum inside o' my head, and somebody was pounding on it,—tummy, tum, tum."
Grandma had said it was best to leave her alone, in the hope that she might fall asleep. But the sleep would not come, though dreams did, one after another, like pictures in a panorama.
When she shut her eyes, she could see a little red boat rocking on the water like a cradle; then a great wave would dash against it, and turn it over, with all its passengers. The screaming sea-gulls seemed to be looking far down into the water in search of the sinking children; but the children could not look up to see the gulls, for their eyes were closed, and they were "drowned in the depths of the sea."
Dotty tried to shut out these horrid pictures. If her dear mamma were only here to talk to her, and lay a cool hand on her head—that mamma she had just disobeyed! Then Dotty repeated some verses she had learned long ago:—
"At night my mamma comes up stairs,— She comes to hear me say my prayers;
And while I'm kneeling on her knee,
She always kisses little me."
When it came to the last line the poor child buried her face in the pillow. Papa was good, and grandma was good; but there was no one like anybody's own mamma, after all.
"'She always kisses little me,'" murmured Dotty. "'She always kisses little me.' She gives me twenty kisses when I go to bed, 'cept when I'm naughty, and then I don't have but ten."
Dotty counted the number of knobs on the bureau drawers, and then went on:—
"I think if I was in my mamma's place, and had me to take care of, I'd throw me out of the window; I wouldn't keep such a girl!"
Dotty had great satisfaction in scolding herself when she was all alone. It was a way she had of "doing her own punishing."