and keeping up the swinging trot with a steadiness which shewed good wind on the part of both the chair-bearers, at last the little house where Sam had been left hove in view.  Time it was; full time.  One and another sough of the wind had bowed the tree-tops with a token of what was coming; one and another bright flash of lightning had illumined the woody wilderness; and now just as the chair stopped, drops began to fall which seemed as large as cherry-stones, mingled with hail a good deal larger.  Their patter sounded on the leaves a minute or two; then ceased.

“That will do, Logan,” said the doctor.  “Bring the chair in under shelter if you can; and come in yourself.  This will be a shower.”  And he led Daisy into the house.

If ever you saw a dark-looking place, that was the room into which the house door admitted them.  Two little windows seemed at this instant to let in the darkness rather than the light; they were not very clean, besides being small.  A description which Daisy would have said applied to the whole room.  She stood still in the middle of the floor, not seeing any place to sit down, that she could make up her mind to take.  The doctor went to the window.  Logan took a chair.  Sam was sitting disconsolately in a corner.  It was hard to say to what class of people the house belonged; poor people they were of course; and things looked as if they were simply living there because too poor to live anywhere else.  A slatternly woman stared at the intruders; a dirty child crawled over the hearth.  Daisy could not endure to touch anything, except with the soles of her shoes.  So she stood upright in the middle of the floor; till the doctor turned round.

“Daisy!—­are you going to stand there till the shower is over?”

“Yes, sir,”—­Daisy answered patiently.  A smile curled the doctor’s lips.  He opened the door and lifted in the chair with its long poles, which indeed half filled the little room; but Daisy sat down.  The woman looked on in astonishment.

“Be she weakly, like?” she asked at length of the doctor.

“Has been—­” he answered.

“And what be that thing for?”

“It is for going up and down mountains.”

“Have you come from the mountings!” she asked in great surprise.  The doctor was in for it.  He was obliged to explain.  Meanwhile the darkness continued and the rain did not yet fall.  A breath of wind now and then brushed heavily past the house, and sunk into silence.  The minutes passed.

“It will be a happiness if they get here before it begins,” said Dr. Sandford; “it will come when it comes!”

“Be there more comin’?” said the woman.

“A houseful.  We are only the beginning.”