n beholding
his countenance--no affected revulsion at the sight of his deformity;
but she looked upon him with gratitude--she thanked him with tears. The
cripple started--his heart burned. To be gazed on with kindness, to be
thanked, and with tears, and by one so fair, so young, so beautiful, was
to him so strange, so new, he half doubted the reality of the scene
before him. Before the kindness and gratitude that beamed from her eyes,
the misanthropy that had frozen up his bosom began to dissolve, and the
gloom on his features died away, as a vapour before the face of the
morning sun. New thoughts fired his imagination--new feelings transfixed
his heart. Her smile fell like a sunbeam on his soul, where light had
never before dawned; her accents of gratitude, from the moment they were
delivered, became the music of his memory. He found an object on the
earth that he could love--or shall we say that he _did_ love; for he
felt as though already her existence were mysteriously linked to his. We
are no believers in what is termed _love at first sight_. Some
romance-writers hold it up as an established doctrine, and love-sick
boys and moping girls will make oath to the creed. But there never was
love at first sight that a week's perseverance could not wear away. It
holds no intercourse with the heart, but is a mere _fancy_ of the eye;
as a man would fancy a horse, a house, or a picture, which he desires to
purchase. Love is not the offspring of an hour or a day, nor is it the
_ignis fatuus_ which plays about the brain, and disturbs the sleep of
the youth and the maiden in their teens. It slowly steals and dawns upon
the heart, as day imperceptibly creeps over the earth, first with the
tinged cloud--the grey and the clearer dawn--the approaching, the
rising, and the risen sun--blending into each other a brighter and a
brighter shade; but each indistinguishable in their progress and
blending, as the motion of the pointers on a watch, which move
unobserved as time flies, and we mark not the silent progress of light
till it envelop us in its majesty. Such is the progress of pure, holy,
and enduring love. It springs not from mere sight, but its radiance
grows with esteem; it is the whisper of sympathy, unity of feeling, and
mutual reverence, which increases with a knowledge of each other, until
but one pulse seems to throb in two bosoms. The feelings which now
swelled in the bosom of Ebenezer Baird were not the true and only love
w