"There's a wake in Tim Reilly's second floor—can't you go there, and they'll tell you—can't you?"
The messenger disappeared, and I now, before putting the question for which I had stopped, asked the woman soothingly the cause of her perturbation.
"Is it what's the matther, sir? Matther enough thin—a poor crethur of a woman lodgin' with me is took very bad with the fever. She wasn't to say so bad entirely till this evenin', when she begin to rave, and 'sist upon gettin' up; an' goin' on with terrible talk, that it would frighten the heart o' you to hear her."
"How long," I said, "has she been ill?"
"Wisha, sir, she was never well since the day she darkened my dure; but I think 'tis the heat o' the weather, an' her never stirrin' out, an' the weakness entirely, an' the impression on her heart, that is killin' her now."
"And has she had no advice?"
"Sorrow the 'vice—you'd think she'd go into fits when I mentioned a docther to her; and as to a priest or a ministher—my dear life, I might as well mention a blunderbush."
Well accustomed to hear of, and witness, such suffering as the woman described, I was about to proceed in quest of a physician myself, if she had paused in the first part of the sentence just finished. The concluding remarks arrested me.
"I am a clergyman," I said; "will you let me see this poor person?"
"An' a thousand welcomes, sir. I know you're not the Revern' Misthur Falvey, that I goes to a' Christmas an' Easther—nor the ministher convenient here. Maybe you're"——