"You had better watch him closely, Mrs. Pratt, his condition is precarious, and as he has been thrown on your hands, do not treat him shabbily--" "You ken bet I'll not," said the matronly female, who stood half hidden in the humble doorway, from which Dr. Belford had just made his exit. "Lawks, doctor dear, I'll have an eye to him, jest as if he was my very own. It'ud not be me 'at would neglec' any Christian that fate had thrown on me hands." "I thought so," said the doctor, half apologetically. "I'll call again shortly," and then, gathering in the fringe of his carriage apron, Dr. Belford bade Mrs. Pratt a temporary farewell, and was off. The small shabby brown door closed gently enough, and separated Mrs. Pratt from the whole moving mass of animate confusion that reigned in the streets outside. As she stopped, on her way through the narrow passage within, to straighten the rag mat at the door of the front room, she sighed perplexedly and soliloquized resignedly: "Fever! above all things else--bless the sickness--likely as not it could be the death o' me, and yet, how could I send the lad away or go back on him now." A hissing noise from the kitchen, transported the meditative Mrs. Pratt in a wonderful hurry from her philanthropic reasoning to a saucepan of potatoes that were bubbling furiously in the water, over a good fire in her cracked cooking stove; but though she busied herself with her daily duties for the next hour, her face was unusually serious, and her mind agitated. She was reflecting earnestly on the new charge that had been thrust upon her, and wondering whether a tough old woman who had never had the measles could escape the contagion of typhoid fever, Mrs. Pratt had a small faded cottage all to herself, the substantial token of the late John Pratt's esteem, before he left for his long journey to the better land; and though the locality was a poor one, and the neighbors noisy and rough, this particular dwelling impressed one strongly with in idea of the "shabby genteel" in all its painful gentility, and also filled the heart with a ready sympathy for the "old decency" that yet survived within those paintless, sunburnt shutters, and those faded, pitted walls. But inside this uncomfortable appearance of washed-out brick and well-ripened wood, there was comfort and cleanliness and quiet. The front room, with its stiff cane rocker and chairs, its round table and well-adorned mantelpiece, its cretonne-covered lounge and tapestry carpet, was not a bad sample at all, of a drawing-room in a third-rate boarding house.