use her idol and prophet among the
poets, wild nature's interpreter, was that day on the side of the
children. How like a bath of freshness would the thick faintly-fragrant
mass shine to her patient! Only to look at it was medicine! She believed,
in her lively healthfulness, that the look would give him a spring to
health, and she hurried forward to have them in water-the next sacred
obligation to the leaving of them untouched.

She had reared herself on our poets. If much brooding on them will
sometimes create a sentimentalism of the sentiment they inspire, that
also, after our manner of developing, leads to finer civilisation; and as
her very delicate feelings were not always tyrants over her clear and
accurate judgement, they rather tended to stamp her character than lead
her into foolishness. Blunt of speech, quick in sensibility, imaginative,
yet idealistic, she had the complex character of diverse brain and nerve,
and was often a problem to the chief person interested in it. She thought
so decisively, felt so shrinkingly; spoke so flatly, brooded so softly!
Such natures, in the painful effort to reconcile apparent antagonism and
read themselves, forget that they are not full grown. Longer than others
are they young: but meanwhile they are of an age when we are driven
abroad to seek and shape our destinies.

Passing through the garden-gate of Lappett's farm she made her way to the
south-western face of the house to beg a bowl of water of the farmer's
wife, and had the sweet surprise of seeing her patient lying under
swallows' eaves on a chair her brother had been commissioned to send from
London for coming uses. He was near the farm-wife's kitchen, but to
windward of the cooking-reek, pleasantly warmed, sufficiently shaded, and
alone, with open letter on the rug covering his legs. He whistled to
Jane's dog Wayland, a retriever, having Newfoundland relationships, of
smithy redness and ruggedness; it was the whistle that startled her to
turn and see him as she was in the act of handing Mrs. Lappett her
primroses.

'Out? I feared it would be a week. Is it quite prudent?' Jane said,
toning down her delight.

He answered with the half-smile that refers these questions to the
settled fact. Air had always brought him round; now he could feel he was
embarked for recovery: and he told her how the farmer and one of his men
had lent a shoulder to present him to his old and surest
physician--rather like a crippled ghost. M