In the spring of 1871 both my children were taken ill with hooping-cough.  The boy, Digby, vigorous and merry, fought his way through it with no danger, and with comparatively little suffering; Mabel, the baby, had been delicate since her birth; there had been some little difficulty in getting her to breathe after she was born, and a slight tendency afterwards to lung-delicacy.  She was very young for so trying a disease as hooping-cough, and after a while bronchitis set in, and was followed by congestion of the lungs.  For weeks she lay in hourly peril of death; we arranged a screen round the fire like a tent, and kept it full of steam to ease the panting breath, and there I sat all through those weary weeks with her on my lap, day and night.  The doctor said that recovery was impossible, and that in one of the fits of coughing she must die; the most distressing thing was that at last the giving of a drop or two of milk brought on the terrible convulsive choking, and it seemed cruel to torture the apparently dying child.  At length, one morning when the doctor was there, he said that she could not last through the day; I had sent for him hurriedly, for her body had swollen up rapidly, and I did not know what had happened; the pleura of one lung had become perforated, and the air escaping into the cavity of the chest had caused the swelling; while he was there, one of the fits of coughing came on, and it seemed as though it would be the last; the doctor took a small bottle of chloroform out of his pocket, and putting a drop on a handkerchief, held it near the child’s face, till the drug soothed the convulsive struggle.  “It can’t do any harm at this stage,” he said, “and it checks the suffering.”  He went away, saying that he would return in the afternoon, but he feared he would never see the child alive again.  One of the kindest friends I had in my married life was that same doctor, Mr. Lauriston Winterbotham; he was as good as he was clever, and, like so many of his noble, profession, he had the merits of discretion and of silence.

That chance thought of his about the chloroform, verily, I believe, saved the child’s life.  Whenever one of the convulsive fits was coming on I used it, and so not only prevented to a great extent the violence of the attacks, but also the profound exhaustion that followed them, when of breath at the top of the throat showing that she still lived.  At last, though more than once we had thought her dead, a change took place for the better, and the child began slowly to mend.  For years, however, that struggle for life left its traces on her, not only in serious lung-delicacy but also in a form of epileptic fits.  In her play she would suddenly stop, and become fixed for about a minute, and then go on again as though nothing had occurred.  On her mother a more permanent trace was left.