ht
weeks' tussle with them, has just about enough spunk left to cry when
anybody looks at her.

Three woolly sheep and a fairy all at once have robbed her of all
hope, and in the midst of it all she weeps as if her heart would
break. Even when the nurse pulls one of the unresisting muttonheads,
and it emits a loud "Baa-a," she stops only just for a second or two
and then wails again. The sheep look rather surprised, as they have a
right to. They have come to be little Annie's steady company, hers and
her fellow-sufferers' in the mixed-measles ward. The triangular lawn
upon which they are browsing is theirs to gambol on when the sun
shines, but cross the walk that borders it they never can, any more
than the babies with whom they play. Sumptuary law rules the island
they are on. Habeas corpus and the constitution stop short of the
ferry. Even Comstock's authority does not cross it: the one exception
to the rule that dolls and sheep and babies shall not visit from ward
to ward is in favor of the rubber dolls, and the etiquette of the
island requires that they shall lay off their woollen jackets and go
calling just as the factory turned them out, without a stitch or
shred of any kind on.

As for the rest, they are assigned, babies, nurses, sheep, rattles,
and railroad trains, to their separate measles, scarlet fever, and
diphtheria lawns or wards, and there must be content to stay. A sheep
may be transferred from the scarlet-fever ward with its patron to the
mixed-measles or diphtheria, when symptoms of either of these diseases
appear, as they often do; but it cannot then go back again, lest it
carry the seeds of the new contagion to its old friends.

Even the fairies are put under the ban of suspicion by such evil
associations, and, once they have crossed the line, are not allowed to
go back to corrupt the good manners of the babies with only one
complaint.

Pauline Meyer, the bigger of the two girls on the mixed-measles
stoop,--the other is friendless Annie,--has just enough strength to
laugh when her sheep's head is pulled. She has been on the limits of
one ward after another these four months, and has had everything,
short of typhus fever and smallpox, that the island affords.

It is a marvel that there is one laugh left in her whole little
shrunken body after it all; but there is, and the grin on her face
reaches almost from ear to ear, as she clasps the biggest fairy in an
arm very little stouter than a boy's