Before night, Mr. Kirby had visited every sick person in the place, in company with the doctor. The poor doctor would hardly have ventured to go his round without the assistance of some novelty that might divert the attention of the people from his atrocities. Mr. Kirby did not attempt to get rid of the subject. He told the discontented, to their faces, that the doctor knew his business better than they did; and bade them remember that it was not the doctor but themselves that had set fire to spirits of wine, or something of that sort, in the middle of the street, whereby a woman was in imminent danger of being burnt to death; and that their outrage on the good fame and property of a gentleman who had worn himself half dead with fatigue and anxiety on their account might yet cost them very dear, if it were not understood that they were so oppressed with sorrow and want that they did not know what they were about. His consultations with the doctor from house to house, and his evident deference to him in regard to matters of health and sickness, wrought a great change in a few hours; and the effect was prodigiously increased when Mrs. Kirby, herself a surgeon’s daughter, and no stranger in a surgery, offered her daily assistance in making up the medicines, and administering such as might be misused by those who could not read the labels. “That is what the Good Lady does, when she can get out at the right time,” observed some one; “but now poor Jem is down, and his mother hardly up again yet, it is not every day, as she says, that she can go so far out of call.” “Who is this Good Lady?” inquired Mr. Kirby. “I have been hardly twenty-four hours in this place, and I seem to have heard her name fifty times; and yet nobody seems able to say who she is.” “She almost overpowers their faculties, I believe,” replied the doctor; “and, indeed, it is not very easy to look upon her as upon any other young lady. It comes easier to one’s tongue to call her an angel than to introduce her as Miss Mary Pickard, from America.” When he had told what he knew of her, the Kirbys said, in the same breath, “Let us go and see her.” And the doctor showed them the way to Widow Johnson’s, where poor Jem was languishing, in that state which is so affecting to witness, when he who has no intellect seems to have more power of patience than he who has most. The visitors arrived at a critical moment, however, when poor Jem’s distress was very great, and his mother’s hardly less. There lay the Good Lady on the ground, doubled up in a strange sort of way; Mrs. Johnson trying to go to her, but unable; and Jem, on his bed in the closet within, crying because something was clearly the matter. “What’s to do now?” exclaimed the doctor. Mary laughed as she answered, “O nothing, but that I can’t get up. I don’t know how I fell, and I can’t get up. But it is mere fatigue—want of sleep. Do convince Aunty that I have not got the fever.”