nful and terrible
portrait--the face of my stricken child. As hour after hour passed away,
without bringing the smallest change or amendment, we grew both alarmed,
and at length absolutely terrified for her safety.

We called in a physician toward night, and told him that we had reason to
suspect that the child had somehow been frightened, and that in no other
way could we at all account for the extraordinary condition in which he
found her.

This was a man, I may as well observe, though I do not name him, of the
highest eminence in his profession, and one in whose skill, from past
personal experience, I had the best possible reasons for implicitly
confiding.

He asked a multiplicity of questions, the answers to which seemed to
baffle his attempts to arrive at a satisfactory diagnosis. There was
something undoubtedly anomalous in the case, and I saw plainly that there
were features in it which puzzled and perplexed him not a little.

At length, however, he wrote his prescription, and promised to return at
nine o'clock. I remember there was something to be rubbed along her
spine, and some medicines beside.

But these remedies were as entirely unavailing as the others. In a state
of dismay and distraction we watched by the bed in which, in accordance
with the physician's direction, we had placed her. The absolute
changelessness of her condition filled us with despair. The day which had
elapsed had not witnessed even a transitory variation in the dreadful
character of her seizure. Any change, even a change for the worse, would
have been better than this sluggish, hopeless monotony of suffering.

At the appointed hour the physician returned. He appeared disappointed,
almost shocked, at the failure of his prescriptions. On feeling her pulse
he declared that she must have a little wine. There had been a wonderful
prostration of all the vital powers since he had seen her before. He
evidently thought the case a strange and precarious one.

She was made to swallow the wine, and her pulse rallied for a time, but
soon subsided again. I and the physician were standing by the fire,
talking in whispers of the darling child's symptoms, and likelihood of
recovery, when we were arrested in our conversation by a cry of anguish
from the poor mother, who had never left the bedside of her little child,
and this cry broke into bitter and convulsive weeping.

The poor little child had, on a sudden, stretched down her little hands
and