One night, when she was at the worst, her poor mother, who had sat for
many a melancholy hour listening, by her bedside, to those plaintive
incoherences of delirium and moanings of fever, which have harrowed so
many a fond heart, gained gradually from her very despair the courage
which she had so long wanted, and knelt down at the side of her sick
darling's bed to pray for her deliverance.

With clasped hands, in an agony of supplication, she prayed that God
would, in his mercy, spare her little child--that, justly as she herself
deserved the sorest chastisement his hand could inflict, he would yet
deal patiently and tenderly with her in this one thing. She poured out
her sorrows before the mercy-seat--she opened her heart, and declared her
only hope to be in his pity; without which, she felt that her darling
would only leave the bed where she was lying for her grave.

Exactly as she came to this part of her supplication, the child, who had
grown, as it seemed, more and more restless, and moaned and muttered with
increasing pain and irritation, on a sudden started upright in her bed,
and, in a thrilling voice, cried--

"No! no!--the baby first."

The mysterious sentence which had secretly tormented her for so long,
thus piercingly uttered by this delirious, and, perhaps, dying child,
with what seemed a preternatural earnestness and strength, arrested her
devotions, and froze her with a feeling akin to terror.

"Hush, hush, my darling!" said the poor mother, almost wildly, as she
clasped the attenuated frame of the sick child in her arms; "hush, my