Fever 1793 Lesson 1.0

Our narrator awakes on a hot and sweaty morning in August 1793. A mosquito is buzzing in one of her ears and someone is screeching in the other. The narrator's mother is demanding that she, a girl named Matilda, get out of bed. Someone named Polly, the mother tells us, is running late. Matilda, we learn, lives in a small room above a coffeehouse in Philadelphia.

Matilda's mother again urges her with the classic line: "When I was a girl, we were up before the sun…" Matilda has apparently heard this one before. Her mother was a perfect child who grew up during the American Revolutionary War. She was a hard worker who stitched quilts and spun wool all before breakfast. Matilda's thoughts on this? "How utterly unlike me!".