this matter. And it
so proved that it called for much patience and long endurance to carry
through the duties, say rather the kind offices, the painful pleasures,
which she had chosen as her share in the household where accident had
thrown her. She had that genius of ministration which is the special
province of certain women, marked even among their helpful sisters by a
soft, low voice, a quiet footfall, a light hand, a cheering smile, and a
ready self-surrender to the objects of their care, which such trifles as
their own food, sleep, or habits of any kind never presume to interfere
with. Day after day, and too often through the long watches of the night,
she kept her place by the pillow.

That girl will kill herself over me, Sir,--said the poor Little Gentleman
to me, one day,--she will kill herself, Sir, if you don't call in all the
resources of your art to get me off as soon as may be. I shall wear her
out, Sir, with sitting in this close chamber and watching when she ought
to be sleeping, if you leave me to the care of Nature without dosing me.

This was rather strange pleasantry, under the circumstances. But there
are certain persons whose existence is so out of parallel with the larger
laws in the midst of which it is moving, that life becomes to them as
death and death as life.--How am I getting along?--he said, another
morning. He lifted his shrivelled hand, with the death's-head ring on
it, and looked at it with a sad sort of complacency. By this one
movement, which I have seen repeatedly of late, I know that his thoughts
have gone before to another condition, and that he is, as it were,
looking back on the infirmities of the body as accidents of the past.
For, when he was well, one might see him often looking at the handsome
hand with the flaming jewel on one of its fingers. The single
well-shaped limb was the source of that pleasure which in some form or
other Nature almost always grants to her least richly endowed children.
Handsome hair, eyes, complexion, feature, form, hand, foot, pleasant
voice, strength, grace, agility, intelligence,--how few there are that
have not just enough of one at least of these gifts to show them that the
good Mother, busy with her millions of children, has not quite forgotten
them! But now he was thinking of that other state, where, free from all
mortal impediments, the memory of his sorrowful burden should be only as
that of the case he has shed to the insect whose "