during the Christmas holidays, which, being snowy and bright, drew the
colony to the Bluffs for coasting, skating, etc., giving father such a
river of senseless accidents to wade through that he threatens to absent
himself and take refuge with Martin Cortright in his Irving Place den for
holiday week next year. Father has ridden many a night when the roads
would not admit of wheeling, without thought of complaint, to the
charcoal camp to tend a new mother, a baby, or a woodchopper suddenly
stricken with pneumonia, that is so common a disease among men living as
these do on poor food, in tiny close cabins, and continually getting
checks of perspiration in the variable climate. During the holidays he
was called to the Bluffs in the middle of two consecutive nights, first
to the Vanderveers, and requested to "drug" the second assistant butler,
who was wildly drunk, and being a recent acquisition had been brought to
officiate at the house party without due trial, "so that he wouldn't be
used up the next day," and then to the Ponsonby's, where the family had
evidently not yet gone to bed. Here he found that the patient, a visiting
school friend of one of the daughters, from up the state, and evidently
not used to the whirl of the pool, had skated all day, and, kept going by
unaccustomed stimulants, taken half from ignorance, half from bravado,
had danced the evening through at the club house, and then collapsed. Her
hostess, careless through familiarity with it, had given her a dose of
one of the chloral mixtures "to let her have a good night's sleep"; but
instead it had sent her into hysterics, and she was calling wildly for
her mother to come and take her home. Father returned from both visits
fairly white with rage. Not at the unfortunates themselves, be it said,
but at the cool nonchalance of those who summoned him.

The butler's was a common enough case. That of the young girl moved him
to pity, and then indignation, as he sifted, out the cause of the attack,
in order to treat her intelligently. This questioning Mrs. Ponsonby