Frau Nimptsch was evidently anxious and uneasy, although indeed one could not tell whether the cause was what Lena had told her or the struggle for breath. But it almost seemed as if it were her breathing, for suddenly she said: "Lena, child, I am not high enough. You will have to put the song book under me too." Lena did not contradict her, but went and got the song book. But when she brought it, her mother said: "No, not that one, that is the new one. I want the old one, the thick one with the two clasps." And when Lena came back with the thick song book, she went on: "I used to have to bring that same book to my mother too when I was not much more than a child and my mother was not yet fifty; and she suffered here too, and her great frightened eyes kept looking at me so. But when I put the Porst song book, that she had got when she was confirmed, under her, she grew perfectly quiet and fell peacefully asleep. And I want to do that too. Ah, Lena. It isn't death ... but dying.... There, now. Ah, that helps me." Lena wept softly to herself and since she now saw plainly that the good old woman's last hour was very near, she sent word to Frau Doerr, that "her mother was in a bad way and would not Frau Doerr come." She sent word back, "Yes, she would come." Toward six o'clock she arrived, bustling noisily in, for she knew nothing about being quiet, even with sick people. She tramped about the room so that everything on or near the hearth shook and rattled, and at the same time she scolded about Doerr, who was always in town when he ought to be at home, and always at home when she wished he was in Jericho. Meanwhile she took the sick woman's hand and asked Lena, "whether she had given her plenty of the drops?" "Yes." "How many have you given her?" "Five ... five every two hours." That was not enough, Frau Doerr assured her, and after bringing to light all her medical knowledge she added: "She had let the medicine draw in the sun for a fortnight, and if one took it properly the water would go away as if it were pumped out. Old Selke at the Zoological had been just like a cask, and for more than four months he could never go to bed, but had to be propped up straight in a chair with all the windows wide open, but when he had taken the medicine for four days, it was just as if you squeezed a pig's bladder: haven't you seen how everything goes out of it and it is all soft and limp again!" While she was telling all this, the vigorous Frau Doerr forced the sick woman to take a double dose from her thimble. Lena, whose anxiety was only too justly redoubled by these heroic measures, took her shawl and made ready to go for a doctor. And Frau Doerr, who was not usually in favor of doctors, had nothing to say against it this time. "Go," said she, "she can't hold out much longer. Just look here (and she pointed to the nostrils), that means death."