She had not gane a mile but twa,
When she heard the dead-bell ringing,
And every jow that the dead-bell gied,
It cryed, Woe to Barbara Allan!
And “Oh no! not Woe,” she would say in her heart.
Soon after this, Miss Rawlings fell ill. A day or two before she took to her bed, she had been walking along Laburnum Avenue, and had happened to see the pupils of the Miss Miffinses’ Young Ladies’ Seminary taking the air. Now, the last two and smallest of these pupils—of the Crocodile, as rude little boys call it—were walking arm in arm with the nice English mistress, chattering away like birds in a bush. Both of them were rather narrow little creatures, both wore beaver hats beneath which dangled brown pigtails. It was yet one more astonishing moment, and Miss Rawlings had almost broken into a run—as much of a run, that is, as being of so stout and ample a presence she was capable of—in order to get a glimpse of their faces.
But, alas! and alack! the wrought-iron gates of the school were just round the corner of Laburnum Avenue, and the whole Crocodile had completely disappeared into the great stone porch beyond by the time she had come in sight of the two Monkey-Puzzles on the lawn, and the brass curtain bands to the windows.
Miss Rawlings stood and gazed at these—for the moment completely forgetting polite manners. The hurry and excitement had made her hot and breathless: and the wind was in the east. It dispirited her, and instead of ringing the bell and asking for the Miss Miffinses, she had returned home and had at once written an invitation to the whole school to come to tea the following Sunday afternoon. In a moment of absent-mindedness, however, she left the note on her little rose-wood secretaire beside the silver inkstand that had belonged to Sir Samuel. And two days afterwards—on the Friday, that is, the month being February—she had been seized with Bronchitis.
It was a rather more severe attack than was usual for Miss Rawlings, even in foggy November, and it made Miss Rawlings’s family physician a little anxious. There was no immediate danger, he explained to Nurse Murphy; still care is care. And Miss Rawlings, being so rich and so important to the Parish, he at once decided to invite an eminent Consultant to visit his patient—a Sir James Jolliboy Geoghehan who lived in Harley Street and knew more about Bronchitis (Harley Street being also in a foggy parish) than any other medical man in Europe or in the United States of America (which are not usually foggy places).
Fortunately, Sir James took quite as bright and sanguine a view of his patient as did Miss Rawlings’s family physician. There Miss Rawlings lay, propped up against her beautiful down pillows with the frills all round, and a fine large pale blue-ribboned bed cap stood up on her large head. She was breathing pretty fast, and her temperature, according to both the gentlemen’s thermometers, was 102.6.