ce
said about my first-born being pantophagous, I began to suspect that I
had a very sick boy on my hands.

At noon, when he seemed no better, I made a mild mustard-plaster and
put it on the upper part of his little chest. I let it burn there
until he began to cry with the discomfort of it. Then I tucked a
double fold of soft flannel above his thorax.

As night came on he was more flushed and feverish than ever, and I
wished to heaven that I'd a clinic thermometer in the house. For by
this time I was more than worried: I was panicky. Yet Duncan, when he
came in, and got out of his oil-skins, didn't seem very sympathetic.
He flatly refused to share my fears. The child, he acknowledged, had a
croupy little chest-cold, but all he wanted was keeping warm and as
much water as he could drink. Nature, he largely protested, would
attend to a case like that.

I was ready to turn on him like a she-tiger, but I held myself in,
though it took an effort. I saw Duncan go off to bed, dog-tired, of
course, but I felt that to go to sleep, under the circumstances, would
be criminal. Dinkie, in the meantime, was waking every now and then
and barking like a baby-coyote. I could have stood it, I suppose, if
that old Bobs of ours hadn't started howling outside, in long-drawn
and dreary howls of unutterable woe. I remembered about a dog always
howling that way when somebody was going to die in the house. And I
concluded, with an icy heart, that it was the death-howl. I tried to
count Dinkie's pulse, but it was so rapid and I was so nervous that I
lost track of the beats. So I decided to call Dinky-Dunk.

He came in to us kind of sleepy-eyed and with his hair rumpled up, and
asked, without thinking, what I wanted.

And I told him, with a somewhat shaky voice, what I wanted. I said I
wanted antiphlogistine, and a pneumonia-jacket, and a doctor, and a
trained nurse, and just a few of the comforts of civilization.

Dinky-Dunk, staring at me as though I were a madwoman, went over to
Dinkie's crib, and felt his forehead and the back of his neck, and held
an ear against the boy's chest, and then against his shoulder-blades.
He said it was all right, and that I myself ought to be in bed. As
though in answer to that Dinkie barked out his croupy protest, tight
and hard, barked as I'd never heard a child bark before. And I began to
fuss, for it tore my heart to think of that little body burning up with
fever and being denied its breath.

"You m