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“Yiss ma’an, yiss sir; I got it here,” answered the boy, as, with his uninjured hand, he drew up his battered trophy, hung about his neck on a piece of antiseptic gauze. “It’s from sure gold und you gives it to me over that cat. But say, Teacher, Missis Bailey, horses ain’t like cats.”

“No, dear, I know; that was a wicked horse.”

“Yiss ma’an; I guess you don’t know ’bout horses. You said boys should make all times what is loving mit horses, but horses don’t make what is lovin’ mit boys. Und my mamma she says it’s a foolishness you should make what is lovin’ mit somebody sooner somebody don’t make what is loving mit you.”

“That,” said Dr. Ingraham, with a reproachful eye upon Miss Bailey, “is one of the truest truths in all the laws and the prophets. ‘A foolishness’ it certainly is.”

“That’s how my mamma says,” Morris plaintively continued. “Und I guess she knows. I done it und now I’m got a sickness over it.”

“Of course you have,” acquiesced the doctor. “So have I. We all get it at times and its name is–“

“Don’t listen to him, honey,” Miss Bailey interrupted. “You will be all right again in a few weeks.”

“Years,” interposed the doctor.

“And while you are here I shall come to see you every day to bring you books and candy and to tell you stories.”

“Tell me one now,” Morris implored. “Take off your hat so I can put mine head at your necktie, und then you should tell me that story over, ‘Once upon some time when that world was young.'”

It was nearly five o’clock when Miss Bailey gently disengaged herself and set out upon her uptown way. She passed from the hush of the hospital walls and halls into another phase of her accountability. Upon the steps, a woman, wild-eyed and dishevelled, was hurling an unintelligible mixture of pleading and abuse upon the stalwart frame of Patrick Brennan’s father, the policeman on the beat. The woman tore her hair, wept, and beat her breast, but Mr. Brennan’s calm was impassive.

“You can’t see him,” he remarked. “Didn’t they tell you that Thursday was visiting day? Well, and isn’t this Choos-day? Go home now and shut up.”

“Mine Gott, he will die!” wailed the woman.

“Not he,” said Mr. Brennan. “Go home now and come back on Thursday. There’s no good standing there. And there’s no good in coming back in half an hour. You’ll not see him before Thurs-day.”

The woman fell to wild weeping and her sympathetic neighbours followed suit.

“Ach, mine little boy!” she wailed. “Mine arme little Morris!” And “arme little Morris” the neighbours echoed.

“Morris Mogilewsky?” asked Miss Bailey.

“Yes ma’an,” answered Mr. Brennan with a shrug.

“Yes ma’an,” cried the neighbours in shrill chorus.

“Yes ma’an,” wailed the woman. “Mine Morris. They makes I shouldn’t to see him. They takes him here the while he gets killed off of a horse.”

“Killed und chawed off of a horse,” shrieked the comforting neighbours.

“And are you his mother?” pursued Miss Bailey.

“Yes ma’an,” they all answered as before.

“Very well, I think I can take you to see him. But not if you are going to be noisy.”

A stillness as of death settled upon Mrs. Mogilewsky as she sank down at Miss Bailey’s feet in dumb appeal. And Constance Bailey saw in the eyes, so like Morris’s, fixed upon her face, a world of misery which she had surely though innocently wrought.

Dr. Ingraham was summoned and bent to Miss Bailey’s will. A few moments later Morris’s languid gaze embraced his mother, his teacher, and his doctor. The latter found Mrs. Mogilewsky’s woe impervious to any soothing. “Chawed off of a horse!” she whimpered. “All the child what I got, chawed off of a horse!”

“Wicked old horse!” ejaculated Teacher.

“Crazy old Teacher!” snorted Mrs. Mogilewsky. “Fool old Teacher! I sends my little boy on the school so he should the English write und talk und the numbers learn so he comes–through the years maybe –American man, und she learns him foolishness over dogs und cats und horses. Crazy, crazy, crazy!”