ike her child
and he was not like him. He'd grown so pale and bad-looking that she
thought he'd had a stroke from the Good People. But she went to get
him some bread and milk, and she asked her other boy, that was about
seven years old, when it was and how it was that he began to be sick.

"'I left him playing near the fire,' the boy said, 'and I was in the
other room. And I heard a rushing noise, like a great flock of birds
flying down the chimney, and then I heard a cry from my brother and
then again the noise, like the birds were flying out at the chimney
again. And then I ran in and found him there the way you see him
now.'

"Well, if the poor woman had never had trouble with the child before,
she had nothing but trouble now. Crying and squalling it was all the
time, and it nearly ate her out of house and home, and yet it seemed
always sick and weak and thin. The neighbors came and they told her it
was not her child at all, but one of the Good People that had been put
in the place of it, and it was all her own fault for not having it
christened in the right time. But not a word of it all would she
listen to, and she said all the time that, whatever was wrong with it,
it was her own child and she'ld hear nothing to the contrary.

"It was an out-of-the-way place where they lived, and there was no
priest near, or she never could have kept it from being christened as
long as she did. But at last the neighbors themselves said that if she
didn't see to it, they would. And they said to her: 'It's not your
child at all that's in it, and if you'll have it christened you'll
see. And if you won't take the child to the priest with us now, we'll
go to him ourselves and tell him all about it. It's not right to keep
it from him longer.'

"So with that she thought it was no use and she'ld have to do as they
said, and she took the child and tried to dress him, ready to take him
to the priest to be christened. But the roars and the screams that he
let out of him were more than anybody could bear, and at the last she
said: 'Oh, I can't do it; it's too terrible a thing for him; he won't
bear it, and how can I make him?'

"The next day when she came in from her work the other boy said to
her: 'Mother, it was uncommon quiet he was while you was away to-day.
And by and by I went in to see what was ailing him. And there he sat,
looking so like an old man that I was near afraid of him. And he
looked at me and he spoke as plain as an o