But no sooner were we all gay and happy in the house again, running out as we pleased, beginning to think of parties and drives and theatres and all enjoyment--and rather unobservant, as young folks are apt to be unobservant of Aunt Pen's slight habitual pensiveness in the absence of guests or excitement, and of her ways generally--than Aunt Pen would challenge some lobster-salad to mortal combat, and, of course, come out floored by the colic. A little whiskey then; and as a little gave so much ease, she would try a great deal. The result always was a precipitate retreat up-stairs, a howling hysteric, bilious cramps, the doctor, a subcutaneous injection of morphine in her arm; then chattering like a magpie, relapsed into awful silence, and, convinced that the morphine had been carried straight to her heart, a composing of her hands and feet, an injured dismissal of every soul from the room, with the assurance that we should find her straight and stiff and stone-dead in the morning. We never did. For, as we seldom had opportunity of an undisturbed night's rest, we usually took her at her word if any access of ill temper, or despair, or drowsiness occasioned banishment from the presence. Not that we had always been so calm about it; there was a time when we were excited with every alarm, thrown into flurries and panics quite to Aunt Pen's mind, running after the doctor at two o'clock of the morning, building a fire in the range ourselves at midnight to make gruel for her, rubbing her till we rubbed the skin off our hands, combing her hair till we went to sleep standing; but Aunt Pen had cried wolf so long, and the doctors had all declared so stoutly that there was no wolf, that our once soft hearts had become quite hard and concrete. When at last Aunt Pen had had an alarm from nearly every illness for which the pharmacopoeia prescribes, and she knew that neither we nor the doctors would listen to the probability of their recurrence; she had an attack of "sinking." No, there was no particular disease, she used to say, only sinking; she had been pulled down to an extent from which she had no strength to recuperate; she was only sinking, a little weaker to-day than she was yesterday--only sinking. But Aunt Pen ate a very good breakfast of broiled birds and toast and coffee; a very good lunch of cold meats and dainties, and a great goblet of thick cream; a very good dinner of soup and roast and vegetables and dessert, and perhaps a chicken bone at eleven o'clock in the evening. And when the saucy little Israel, who carried up her tray, heard her say she was sinking, he remarked that it was because of the load on her stomach.