Robert Michael Ballantyne

Shifting Winds Robert Michael Ballantyne

I have said that the family circle sat by the fire, but this is not strictly correct. One member of it, the little boy, stood in the middle of the room, howling!-howling so violently that his fat face had changed from its wonted bright red to deep purple. Looking at him-as he stood there arrayed in his uncle's red night-cap, his own night-shirt, which was also a dayshirt and much too small, and his father's pea-jacket, which was preposterously too large-one could not avoid the alarming surmise that there might be such a thing as juvenile apoplexy, and that that boy was on the point of becoming a living, if not a dead, example of the terrible disease.