“Oh, ma!” Pearl said to her mother that night, when the children had gone to bed and they were sewing by the fire.  “Oh, ma! she told me more to-day about me insides than I would care to remember.  Mind ye, ma, there’s a sthring down yer back no bigger’n a knittin’ needle, and if ye ever broke it ye’d snuff out before ye knowed what ye was doin’, and there’s a tin pan in yer ear that if ye got a dinge in it, it wouldn’t be worth a dhirty postage stamp for hearin’ wid, and ye mustn’t skip ma, for it will disturb yer Latin parts, and ye mustn’t eat seeds, or ye’ll get the thing that pa had—­what is it called ma?”

Her mother told her.

“Yes, appendicitis, that’s what she said.  I never knowed there were so many places inside a person to go wrong, did ye, ma?  I just thought we had liver and lights and a few things like that.”

“Don’t worry, alannah,” her mother said soothingly, as she cut out the other leg of Jimmy’s pants.  “The Lord made us right I guess, and he won’t let anything happen to us.”

But Pearl was not yet satisfied.  “But, oh ma,” she said, as she hastily worked a buttonhole.  “You don’t know about the diseases that are goin’ ’round.  Mind ye, there’s tuberoses in the cows even, and them that sly about it, and there’s diseases in the milk as big as a chew o’ gum and us not seein’ them.  Every drop of it we use should be scalded well, and oh, ma, I wonder anyone of us is alive for we’re not half clean!  The poison pours out of the skin night and day, carbolic acid she said, and every last wan o’ us should have a sponge bath at night—­that’s just to slop yerself all up and down with a rag, and an oliver in the mornin’.  Ma, what’s an oliver, d’ye think?”

“Ask Camilla,” Mrs. Watson said, somewhat alarmed at these hygienic problems.  “Camilla is grand at explaining Mrs. Francis’s quare ways.”

Pearl’s brown eyes were full of worry.

“It’s hard to git time to be healthy, ma,” she said; “we should keep the kittle bilin’ all the time, she says, to keep the humanity in the air—­Oh, I wish she hadn’t a told me, I never thought atin’ hurt anyone, but she says lots of things that taste good is black pison.  Isn’t it quare, ma, the Lord put such poor works in us and us not there at the time to raise a hand.”

They sewed in silence for a few minutes.

Then Pearl said:  “Let us go to bed now, ma, me eyes are shuttin’.  I’ll go back to-morrow and ask Camilla about the ‘oliver.’”

CHAPTER IV THE BAND OF HOPE

Mary Barner had learned the lesson early that the only easing of her own pain was in helping others to bear theirs, and so it came about that there was perhaps no one in Millford more beloved than she.  Perhaps it was the memory of her own lost childhood that caused her heart to go out in love and sympathy to every little boy and girl in the village.