Enoch walked in without knocking. A woman, with a baby in her arms, cried out, “Mercy on us!” dropped the baby into a cradle, and, seizing Tate, began to pull off her hood and cloak.
“Fly round, Martha Jane,” said she to her daughter; “take the other one, and rub her hands as quick as you can! Susan Ellen, fetch the camphor-bottle! Where did these children come from?”
And without waiting for an answer, she ran for hot water and ginger.
“Drink this,” said she, coming back with a steaming bowl, whose contents she stirred with a spoon. She was almost obliged to open the little girls’ mouths before she could make them swallow.
“O, mother,” said Martha Jane, tearfully, “don’t you remember the lamb I told you about last year, at uncle Sam’s? how stiff its little jaws were? We had to hold them apart, just this way, to pour down pepper tea.”
Dotty looked up at the big girl in a green dress with a foolish smile.
“Am I a little sheep?” thought she, and closed her eyes.
She felt somebody tucking her into a warm bed. Her clothes had been removed, and there were nice blankets and shawls wrapped about her from head to foot. Then she fancied she was a baby with a purple face, dying of whooping-cough. That there was such a little girl as Tate Penny, she had quite forgotten. And Tate, who lay near her, had forgotten all about Dotty, and her own unfortunate nose. Mrs. Harris stood watching them with enough motherly kindness in her heart to have warmed them, body and soul.
“Bless the little dears, they look all right now, and will be asleep in two minutes; but I assure you, Martha Jane, I thought, when they first came in, it was a pretty hard chance; they wouldn’t have stood it out doors much longer.”