Business took me out West, in the spring of 18--, and kept me in Ohio for the entire summer of that year. After a hard day's ride, in the month of August, I entered, just before nightfall, a certain town lying on the National Road, where I expected to remain for a week. After taking possession of my room at the hotel; shaving, washing, and improving my appearance in other respects, I came down and took a seat in the porch that ran along the front of the house. I had not been here very long before the stage from the East drove up, and the passengers, who were to take supper, as this was a stage-house, alighted. Among them, I noticed a woman with a pale, emaciated, and, I would have said, dying child in her arms. Her face was anxious and haggard in its expression. She was accompanied by a man, whom I rightly supposed to be her husband. He immediately went to the bar and engaged a room, saying that his child was too sick to permit them to continue their journey.
"Do you wish a doctor?" asked the landlord.
"No," replied the man. "We have medicine, prescribed by our own physician before we left home. If that does no good, we have little confidence in any other remedies."
No more was said. The man was shown to his room, whither he retired with his wife and sick child. The room, it so happened, was next to mine, and the two rooms communicated by a door, which was of course closed and fastened.
The emaciated child and anxious mother presented a sight that fixed itself upon my mind, and excited my liveliest sympathies. I could not get them from my thoughts.
About ten o'clock that night, I took a candle and went to my room. Before undressing myself, I sat down at a table to make some entries of collections and expenses, and to think over and arrange my business for the next day. All was still, except now and then a slight movement in the next chamber, where the parents were sitting up with their sick child.
"What did you give him last?" I heard the father say, in a low, but distinct tone.
This I knew to be a deadly poison. I listened, you may be sure, with a more earnest attention.
Two grains of aconite! My hair began to rise. "I think we had better increase the dose to five grains."