further; the remembrance of the past, the excitement she had just
gone through, the long suppressed weeping, were too much for the
child's strength; the tears began to fall fast, and she broke
into violent weeping.
The doctor stood up and laid her head kindly down on the pillow.
"There, there, go on crying, it will do you good, and then go to
sleep; it will be all right to-morrow."
Then he left the room and went downstairs to Herr Sesemann; when
he was once more sitting in the armchair opposite his friend,
"Sesemann," he said, "let me first tell you that your little
charge is a sleep-walker; she is the ghost who has nightly
opened the front door and put your household into this fever of
alarm. Secondly, the child is consumed with homesickness, to such
an extent that she is nearly a skeleton already, and soon will be
quite one; something must be done at once. For the first
trouble, due to her over-excited nerves, there is but one remedy,
to send her back to her native mountain air; and for the second
trouble there is also but one cure, and that the same. So to-
morrow the child must start for home; there you have my
prescription."
Herr Sesemann had arisen and now paced up and down the room in
the greatest state of concern.
"What!" he exclaimed, "the child a sleep-walker and ill! Home-
sick, and grown emaciated in my house! All this has taken place
in my house and no one seen or known anything about it! And you
mean, doctor, that the child who came here happy and healthy, I
am to send back to her grandfather a miserable little skeleton? I
can't do it; you cannot dream of my doing such a thing! Take the
child in hand, do with her what you will, and make her whole and
sound, and then she shall go home; but you must do something
first."
"Sesemann," replied the doctor, "consider what you are doing!
This illness of the child's is not one to be cured with pills
and powders. The child has not a tough constitution, but if you
send her back at once she may recover in the mountain air,
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