When she reached the doctor's house, he was gone. He had started for
the North Precinct early in the evening, his good wife said; he was
called down to Captain Isaac Lovejoy's, the house next to the North
Precinct Meeting House. She'd been sitting up waiting for him, it was
such an awful storm, and such a lonely road. She was worried, but she
didn't think he'd start for home that night; she guessed he'd stay at
Captain Lovejoy's till morning.

The doctor's wife, holding her door open, as best she could, in the
violent wind, had hardly given this information to the little
snow-bedraggled object standing out there in the inky darkness,
through which the lantern made a faint circle of light, before she had
disappeared.

"She went like a speerit," said the good woman, staring out into the
blackness in amazement. She never dreamed of such a thing as Ann's
going to the North Precinct after the doctor, but that was what the
daring girl had determined to do. She had listened to the doctor's
wife in dismay, but with never one doubt as to her own course of
proceeding.

Straight along the road to the North Precinct she kept. It would have
been an awful journey that night for a strong man. It seemed
incredible that a little girl could have the strength or courage to
accomplish it. There were four miles to traverse in a black, howling
storm, over a pathless road, through forests, with hardly a house by
the way.

When she reached Captain Isaac Lovejoy's house, next to the Meeting
House in the North Precinct of Braintree, stumbling blindly into the