"No," I replied. "It seems very odd when I think of it, but I really do
not know even the day."

"Nor any one else, which is stranger still," she answered.

"How does that happen, nurse?"

"We were in terrible anxiety about your mother at the time. So ill was
she, after you were just born, in a strange, unaccountable way, that you
lay almost neglected for more than an hour. In the very act of giving
birth to you, she seemed to the rest around her to be out of her mind,
so wildly did she talk; but I knew better. I knew that she was fighting
some evil power; and what power it was, I knew full well; for twice,
during her pains, I heard the click of the horseshoe. But no one could
help her. After her delivery, she lay as if in a trance, neither dead,
nor at rest, but as if frozen to ice, and conscious of it all the while.
Once more I heard the terrible sound of iron; and, at the moment your
mother started from her trance, screaming, 'My child! my child!' We
suddenly became aware that no one had attended to the child, and rushed
to the place where he lay wrapped in a blanket. Uncovering him, we found
him black in the face, and spotted with dark spots upon the throat. I
thought he was dead; but, with great and almost hopeless pains, we
succeeded in making him breathe, and he gradually recovered. But his
mother continued dreadfully exhausted. It seemed as if she had spent her
life for her child's defence and birth. That was you, Duncan, my dear.

"I was in constant attendance upon her. About a week after your birth,
as near as I can guess, just in the gloaming, I heard yet again the
awful clank--only once. Nothing followed till about midnight. Your