Page:The story of my childhood (1907).djvu/42

36 Shortly the verbal bulletin went out: "A sudden, unaccountable and probably fatal attack of bloody dysentery and convulsions." There was no more for the sympathetic neighbors to do; they turned sadly away, and with them went the report that Captain and Mrs. Barton had lost their little baby girl.

Of all this I have, naturally, no recollection—neither do I know the lapse of time till memory again got hold; but her first grasp of the event was this: I had occupied as a bed a great cradle which had been made for some grown invalid, and preserved in the household. I was bolstered up in this cradle, with a little low table at the side on which was my first meal of solid food. How I had previously been nourished I do not know, but I