efforts I was making, and hastily brought me a glass of water. With the
first recovery of speech, I asked them what little Francis had meant by
saying that he had seen his mother in her bedroom. Their reply was,
that they were as much at a loss to discover his meaning as I was; that
he had made the same assertion to them, and with so much earnestness,
that they had, all in succession, gone up stairs to look for her, and
with the fullest expectation of finding her. This was a mystery which
remained such to the very last; there was no doubt whatsoever that the
child believed himself to have seen his mother; that he could not have
seen her in her human bodily presence, there is as little doubt as
there is, alas! that in this world he never _did_ see her again.
The poor child constantly adhered to his story, and with a
circumstantiality far beyond all power of invention that could be
presumed in an artless infant. Every attempt at puzzling him or
entangling him in contradictions by means of cross-examination was but
labor thrown away; though indeed, it is true enough that for those
attempts, as will soon be seen, there was but a brief interval allowed.

Not dwelling upon this subject at present, I turned to Hannah--a woman
who held the nominal office of cook in our little establishment, but
whose real duties had been much more about her mistress's person--and
with a searching look of appeal I asked her whether, in this moment of
trial, when (as she might see) I was not so perfectly master of myself
as perhaps always to depend upon seeing what was best to be done, she
would consent to accompany me into the city, and take upon herself
those obvious considerations of policy or prudence which might but too
easily escape my mind, darkened, and likely to be darkened, as to its
power of discernment by the hurricane of affliction now too probably at
hand. She answered my appeal with the fervor I expected from what I had
already known of her character. She was a woman of a strong, fiery,