Ann said nothing more, but she went into her own little room with the same determined look in her eyes.  There was a door leading from this room into the kitchen.  Ann slipped through it hastily, lit a lantern which was hanging beside the kitchen chimney, and was out doors in a minute.

The storm was one of sharp, driving sleet, which struck her face like so many needles.  The first blast, as she stepped outside the door, seemed to almost force her back, but her heart did not fail her.  The snow was not so very deep, but it was hard walking.  There was no pretense of a path.  The doctor lived half a mile away, and there was not a house in the whole distance, save the meeting house and schoolhouse.  It was very dark.  Lucky it was that she had taken the lantern; she could not have found her way without it.

On kept the little slender, erect figure, with the fierce determination in its heart, through the snow and sleet, holding the blanket close over its head, and swinging the feeble lantern bravely.

When she reached the doctor’s house, he was gone.  He had started for the North Precinct early in the evening, his good wife said; he was called down to Captain Isaac Lovejoy’s, the house next the North Precinct Meeting House.  She’d been sitting up waiting for him, it was such an awful storm, and such a lonely road.  She was worried, but she didn’t think he’d start for home that night; she guessed he’d stay at Captain Lovejoy’s till morning.

[Illustration:  SHE ALMOST FAINTED FROM COLD AND EXHAUSTION.]

The doctor’s wife, holding her door open, as best she could, in the violent wind, had hardly given this information to the little snow-bedraggled object standing out there in the inky darkness, through which the lantern made a faint circle of light, before she had disappeared.

“She went like a speerit,” said the good woman, staring out into the blackness in amazement.  She never dreamed of such a thing as Ann’s going to the North Precinct after the doctor, but that was what the daring girl had determined to do.  She had listened to the doctor’s wife in dismay, but with never one doubt as to her own course of proceeding.

Straight along the road to the North Precinct she kept.  It would have been an awful journey that night for a strong man.  It seemed incredible that a little girl could have the strength or courage to accomplish it.  There were four miles to traverse in a black, howling storm, over a pathless road, through forests, with hardly a house by the way.

When she reached Captain Isaac Lovejoy’s house, next to the meeting house in the North Precinct of Braintree, stumbling blindly into the warm, lighted kitchen, the captain and the doctor could hardly believe their senses.  She told the doctor about Thirsey; then she almost fainted from cold and exhaustion.

Good-wife Lovejoy laid her on the settee, and brewed her some hot herb tea.  She almost forgot her own sick little girl, for a few minutes, in trying to restore this brave child who had come from the South Precinct in this dreadful storm to save little Thirsey Wales’s life.