the inner room when the old woman happened to be asleep he awakened her and sent her in to Flora Lockhart.  At dawn he fell asleep in his chair and dreamed that he was the mate of a foreign-going ship, and that all he had to do was to shake white powders on to the tongue of the girl he had saved from the fore-top of the Royal William.  Cormick shook him awake when breakfast was ready.  After hearing from Mother Nolan that the girl seemed much cooler and better than she had since the early afternoon of the previous day, he ate his breakfast and went out and sent all the able-bodied men to get timber for Father McQueen’s church, some from the woods and others from the wreck.  They would haul the timber after the next fall of snow.  But he did not go abroad himself.  He hung about the harbor all day, sometimes in his own kitchen, sometimes down on the land-wash, and sometimes in other men’s cabins.  He put a new dressing on the wound of the lad who had received the knife and paid another visit to Dick Lynch.  Lynch was still in bed; but this time he did not drag him out on the floor.

Mother Nolan was full of common sense and wise instincts, in spite of the fact that she believed in fairies, mermaids and the personal attentions of the devil.  She was doctor and nurse by nature as well as by practice—­by everything, in short, but education.  So it happened that she did not follow Pat Kavanagh’s instructions to the letter.  She argued to herself that Pat’s fever had been a hot-climate one, while Flora Lockhart’s was undoubtedly a cold-climate one.  She saw that the girl’s trouble was a sickness, accompanied by high fever, brought on by cold and exposure.  So she did not give the quinine quite as generously as the fiddler had recommended, and kept right on with her hot brews of herbs and roots in addition.  Instinct told her that if she could drive out the cold the fever would follow it out of its own accord.

In the afternoon the girl became restless and highly feverish again, and by sunset she was slightly delirious.  She talked constantly in her wonderful voice of fame, of great cities and of many more things which sounded meaningless and alarming to Mother Nolan.  For a little while she thought she was on the Royal William, talking to the captain about the great reception that awaited her in New York, her own city, which she had left four years ago, humble and unknown, and was now returning to, garlanded with European recognition.  It was all double-Dutch to Mother Nolan.  She put an end to it with her potent dose of quinine and whiskey.  She spent this night in her patient’s room, keeping the fire roaring and catching catnaps in a chair by the hearth; and the skipper haunted the other side of the door.  Toward morning the girl asked for a drink, as sanely as anybody could, took it eagerly, and then sank into a quiet sleep.  The old woman nodded in her chair.  The skipper tiptoed back to the kitchen and flung himself across his bed.