rags that had once been pants depended from the remnant of what had once
been a calico waist. An old bag was pinned around his shoulders, which
completed his entire outfit. "Please ma'am, mother says she'll send
Johnny to school if you'll give him a coat and some breeches." Alas,
there is neither on hand, nothing for the boy except a thin cotton
shirt, and a pair of thin overalls to make over, by a mother who is more
accustomed to the use of a hoe than a needle, and who has seven children
as ragged and miserable as poor Johnny.

A messenger rushes in without knocking. "Come quick--Mattie's baby
burnt!"

"Yes, I'll come. Wrap it in cotton and oil."

Away flies the messenger. I seize the bottle of morphine and a hat, and
follow to the child's home. The floor is strewn with fragments of burnt
clothing. A sickening odor of burnt flesh fills the room. The scorched
high chair, in which the child was tied and put before the open
fireplace, while the mother went to a neighbor's for milk, lay in a pool
of water, and beside it, the burnt whisk-broom that an older baby had
put in the fire, then dropped blazing under the baby's long clothes,
these told the whole sad story. They were all at the grandparent's house
next door--a crowd of screaming people. Upon the bed lay what was left
of the poor child, moaning in conscious agony. A drop of water
containing the precious anodyne which alone could ease it then, soon
brought blessed unconsciousness until death kindly bore the little soul
to God. But oh! the heart-rending grief of that poor mother! God grant
we may never witness such suffering again. We tried to comfort her with
our tearful sympathy and prayers, but God alone can ever heal her sore
heart.