Madeline by Mary Jane Holmes

It was Farmer Green's new buggy and Farmer Green's bay colt which, three days later, stopped before Dr. Holbrook's office, and not the square-boxed wagon, with old Sorrel attached, for the former was standing quietly in the chip-yard, behind the low red house, while the latter, with his nose over the barn-yard fence, was neighing occasionally, as if he missed the little hands which had daily fed him the oatmeal he liked so much, and which now lay hot and parched and helpless upon the white counterpane which Grandma Markham had spun and woven herself.

Maddy might have been just as sick as she was if the examination had never occurred, but it was natural for those who loved her to impute it all to the effects of excitement and cruel disappointment, so there was something like indignation mingling with the sorrow gnawing at the hearts of the old couple as they watched by their fever-stricken darling. Farmer Green, too, shared the feeling, and numerous at first were his animadversions against that _prig of a Holbrook_, who was not fit to doctor a _cat_, much less "examine a _school-marm_. " But when Maddy grew so sick as not to know him or his wife, he laid aside his prejudices, and suggested to Grandpa Markham that Dr. Holbrook be sent for.