h and mustard plasters and
everything else for her comfort.

"When the doctor come, she said, 'This goes the limit,' and then she bit
off the rest and swallered it and said, 'We'll have to scrub her.' And
we did--with washing powder and scouring soap. I hope it hurt, but I'm
'fraid it didn't."

"How does Nellie take it?"

The sorely tried Mrs. Biff grinned. "'Tis that keeps me from quite
sinking; she is most dretful horrified and vowing she's going to leave."

However, Nellie did not go; it was the castaway whom they had succored
who awoke in her right mind before any one was stirring the next
morning, clothed herself, for lack of her own rags (which were airing in
the back yard), in a decent brown dress, cloak and hat of the doctor's
from the guest-room closet, put on the doctor's large, serviceable
boots, and gathering the loose silver and three one-dollar banknotes
left in Katy's cash box, otherwise her "cup" from the pantry shelf,
departed into the unknown nether world from whence she came.

"And a mercy she didn't murder us in our beds!" opined Nellie; "maybe
she will yet!"

Nellie's prophecy appeared less grotesque the following week when her
young man, Phil, by Christian name--I did not come to know his
surname--discovered at the police station or the engine house (he
frequenting both places in his wealth of leisure) that the castaway had
escaped from a quarantined house full of smallpox, in a little hamlet
near by. Here was a situation! Nellie vowed she wouldn't sleep a wink
were she Mrs. Kane or Amos, particularly Amos, because colored folk took
naturally to smallpox.

Amos only grinned; but Mrs. Kane was palpably nervous and began
inquiring into symptoms of what Nellie termed "the dread disease."

Presently she was feeling them faithfully. And Katy shrugged the
shoulder of scorn. But scorn turned into consternation by Monday, for
an agitated neighbor came to the front door to announce that Mrs. Kane
was sick in bed with an awful fever and broke out terrible, and would
the doctor please step over there.

"And all the clothes in the suds!" sighed Katy. "But that's nothing.
Poor Miss Mercy! she's almost out of her mind; she says that _she's_ to
blame; she's brought smallpox on that innocent woman, and most like
she'll die; and if she hadn't been so wicked and headstrong and had
listened to her friend (she didn't name nobody, but I know she means
young Gordon) and her sister, it wouldn't have happened;