Drink this;" and he held to my mouth a glass of something
pleasant and pungent. I drank its entire contents. I think it helped
to quite restore me. I ran wildly about in search of my missing
parent. There was a little group of men and women a short distance
off. I hurried towards it, and recognized Peter, my grandmother's man,
who had come to meet us at the station.

"Where is my father?" I said in a voice hardly audible from terror,
seizing Peter's arm.

Before he could reply, I saw father, white and motionless, upon the
ground.

"He is dead!" I shrieked, springing towards him, and convulsively
throwing my arms about him.

"He is stunned, _not_ dead, my child," said the physician, kindly
drawing me away, to minister to him. "We hope he will soon be better."

In spite of his soothing words and tones, I read the truth in his
face; that he feared life was almost extinct.

"O, what can I do? Save him! save him! You must _not_ let him die! you
must _not_!"

"My poor child, I will do all I can," replied the physician, touched
by my distress.

But no efforts to restore my father to consciousness availed anything.
There was a deep, ugly cut on one side of his head. No other external
injury could be found; yet he had not spoken or moved since he was
taken out from the broken car.

The accident had occurred but a few rods from the station; and as
grandmother's house was scarcely a mile distant, Peter strongly urged
that he should be taken there at once. Accordingly a wagon was
procured. The seats were taken out, and a mattress placed upon the
bottom, and father was carefully laid upon it; and Peter drove rapidly
home, while I followed with the doctor in his buggy. A man had been
sent in advance of us to inform grandmother of our coming. She met us
at the door with a pallid face, but was so outwardly calm, that I took
courage from beholding her.

Father was laid upon a nice, white bed, in a little room on the ground
floor; and again every means for restoring him was resorted to. Still
he remained unconscious.

The hours went on. The old family clock had just struck two, and we
were watching and working in an agony of suspense.

I had not left my father's bedside, till the low, indistinct
conversation between the doctor and grandmother, in the next room,
fell upon my ear.

"There is life yet," said he. "I thought once he had ceased to
breathe."

"And you are quite sure he does?" she inquired.

"Yes. I held a