Mildred Keith

<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN> <h2>MILDRED KEITH</h2> BY<br/> <span class='author'>MARTHA FINLEY</span><br/> <h2>PREFACE.</h2> <p><span class="smcap">The</span> Keith family were relatives of Horace Dinsmore, and as my readers will observe, the date of this story is some seven years earlier than that of the first Elsie book.</p> <p>The journey, and that most <i>sickly</i> season, which I have attempted to describe, were events in my own early childhood. The latter still dwells in my memory as a dreadful dream.</p> <p>Our family&mdash;a large one&mdash;were all down with the fever except my aged grandmother and a little sister of six or seven, and "help could not be had for love or money."</p> <p>My father, who was a physician, kept up and made his rounds among his town and country patients for days after the fever had attacked him, but was at length compelled to take his bed, and I well remember lying there<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</SPAN></span> beside him while the neighbors flocked into the room to consult him about their sick ones at home.</p> <p>That region of country is now, I believe, as healthy as almost any other part of our favored land. Such a season, it was said, had never been known before, and there has been none like it since.</p> <div class='sig'> M. F.<br/></div> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/i002.jpg" width-obs="175" height-obs="41" alt="decoration" /></div> <hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</SPAN></span></p> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/i003.jpg" width-obs="238" height-obs="44" alt="decoration" /></div> <h2>MILDRED KEITH.</h2> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/divider.jpg" width-obs="67" height-obs="7" alt="dividing line" /></div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />