CHAPTER XX.

THE STEAM-DOCTOR.

To return to the house of Samuel Anderson.

Scarcely had August passed out the door when Mrs. Anderson fell into a fit of hysterics, and declared that she was dying of heart-disease.  Her time had come at last!  She was murdered!  Murdered by her own daughter’s ingratitude and disobedience!  Struck down in her own house!  And what grieved her most was that she should never live to see the end of the world!

And indeed she seemed to be dying.  Nothing is more frightful than a good solid fit of hysterics.  Cynthy Ann, inwardly condemning herself as she always did, lifted the convulsed patient, who seemed to be anywhere in her last ten breaths, and carried her, with Mr. Anderson’s aid, down to her room, and while Jonas saddled the horse, Mr. Anderson put on his hat and prepared to go for the doctor.

“Samuel!  O Sam-u-el!  Oh-h-h-h-h!” cried Mrs. Anderson, with rising and falling inflections that even patient Dr. Rush could never have analyzed, laughing insanely and weeping piteously in the same breath, in the same word; running it up and down the gamut in an uncontrolled and uncontrollable way; now whooping like a savage, and now sobbing like the last breath of a broken-hearted.  “Samuel!  Sam-u-el!  O Samuel!  Ha! ha! ha! h-a-a!  Oh-h-h-h-h-h-h!  You won’t leave me to die alone!  After the wife I’ve been to you, you won’t leave me to die alone!  No-o-o-o-o!  HOO-HOO-oo-OO!  You musn’t.  You shan’t.  Send Jonas, and you stay by me!  Think—­” here her breath died away, and for a moment she seemed really to be dying.  “Think,” she gasped, and then sank away again.  After a minute she opened her eyes, and, with characteristic pertinacity, took up the sentence just where she had left off.  She had carefully kept her place throughout the period of unconsciousness.  But now she spoke, not with a gasp, but in that shrill, unnatural falsetto so characteristic of hysteria; that voice—­half yell—­that makes every nerve of the listener jangle with the discord.  “Think, oh-h-h Samuel! why won’t you think what a wife I’ve been to you?  Here I’ve drudged and scrubbed and scrubbed and drudged all these years like a faithful and industrious wife, never neglecting my duty.  And now—­oh-h-h-h—­now to be left alone in my—­” Here she ceased to breathe again for a while.  “In my last hours to die, to die! to die with, out—­without—­Oh-h-h!” What Mrs. Anderson was left to die without she never stated.  Mr. Anderson had beckoned to Jonas when he came in, and that worthy had gone off in a leisurely trot to get the “steam-doctor.”

[Illustration:  “CORN-SWEATS AND CALAMUS.”]