Mildred Keith

The Keith family were relatives of Horace Dinsmore, and as my readers will observe, the date of this story is some seven years earlier than that of the first Elsie book.

The journey, and that most sickly season, which I have attempted to describe, were events in my own early childhood. The latter still dwells in my memory as a dreadful dream.

Our family—a large one—were all down with the fever except my aged grandmother and a little sister of six or seven, and "help could not be had for love or money."

My father, who was a physician, kept up and made his rounds among his town and country patients for days after the fever had attacked him, but was at length compelled to take his bed, and I well remember lying there beside him while the neighbors flocked into the room to consult him about their sick ones at home.

That region of country is now, I believe, as healthy as almost any other part of our favored land. Such a season, it was said, had never been known before, and there has been none like it since.

M. F.

Chapter First.

Table of Contents

"Weep not that the world changes—did it keep

A stable, changeless course, 'twere cause to weep."

—Bryant.

A spring morning in 183-; winter's icy breath exchanged for gentle breezes; a faint tinge of yellow green on the woods but now so brown and bare; violets and anemones showing their pretty modest faces by the roadside; hill and valley clothed with verdure, rivulets dancing and singing, the river rolling onward in majestic gladness; apple, peach and cherry trees in bloom; birds building their nests; men and women busied here and there in field or garden, and over all

"The uncertain glory of an April day."

The sun now shining out warm and bright from a cloudless sky, now veiling his face while a sudden shower of rain sends the busy workers hurrying to the nearest shelter.

The air is full of pleasant rural sounds—the chirp of insects, the twittering of birds, the crowing of cocks—now near at hand, now far away, mellowed by the distance; and in the streets of the pretty village of Lansdale, down yonder in the valley, there is the cheerful hum of busy life; of

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