come out floored by the colic.  A little whiskey then; and as a little gave so much ease, she would try a great deal.  The result always was a precipitate retreat up-stairs, a howling hysteric, bilious cramps, the doctor, a subcutaneous injection of morphine in her arm; then chattering like a magpie, relapsed into awful silence, and, convinced that the morphine had been carried straight to her heart, a composing of her hands and feet, an injured dismissal of every soul from the room, with the assurance that we should find her straight and stiff and stone-dead in the morning.

We never did.  For, as we seldom had opportunity of an undisturbed night’s rest, we usually took her at her word if any access of ill temper, or despair, or drowsiness occasioned banishment from the presence.  Not that we had always been so calm about it; there was a time when we were excited with every alarm, thrown into flurries and panics quite to Aunt Pen’s mind, running after the doctor at two o’clock of the morning, building a fire in the range ourselves at midnight to make gruel for her, rubbing her till we rubbed the skin off our hands, combing her hair till we went to sleep standing; but Aunt Pen had cried wolf so long, and the doctors had all declared so stoutly that there was no wolf, that our once soft hearts had become quite hard and concrete.

When at last Aunt Pen had had an alarm from nearly every illness for which the pharmacopoeia prescribes, and she knew that neither we nor the doctors would listen to the probability of their recurrence; she had an attack of “sinking.”  No, there was no particular disease, she used to say, only sinking; she had been pulled down to an extent from which she had no strength to recuperate; she was only sinking, a little weaker to-day than she was yesterday—­only sinking.  But Aunt Pen ate a very good breakfast of broiled birds and toast and coffee; a very good lunch of cold meats and dainties, and a great goblet of thick cream; a very good dinner of soup and roast and vegetables and dessert, and perhaps a chicken bone at eleven o’clock in the evening.  And when the saucy little Israel, who carried up her tray, heard her say she was sinking, he remarked that it was because of the load on her stomach.

One day, I remember, Aunt Pen was very much worse than usual.  We were all in her room, a sunshiny place which she had connected with the adjoining one by sliding-doors, so that it might be big enough for us all to bring our work on occasion, and make it lively for her.  She had on a white-cashmere dressing-gown trimmed with swan’s-down, and she lay among the luxurious cushions of a blue lounge, with a paler blue blanket, which she had had one of us tricot for her, lying over her feet, and altogether she looked very ideal and ethereal; for Aunt Pen always did have such an eye to picturesque effect that I don’t know how she could ever consent to the idea of mouldering away into dust like common clay.