er on almost every house along the street. She has
witnessed when the typhus fever swept off a whole household, young and
old, all but a lonely mother, who vainly shrieked to follow her last
loved one. Where would be Death's triumph if none lived to weep? She
can speak of strange maladies that have broken out as if
spontaneously, but were found to have been imported from foreign lands
with rich silks and other merchandise, the costliest portion of the
cargo. And once, she recollects, the people died of what was
considered a new pestilence, till the doctors traced it to the ancient
grave of a young girl who thus caused many deaths a hundred years
after her own burial. Strange that such black mischief should lurk in
a maiden's grave! She loves to tell how strong men fight with fiery
fevers, utterly refusing to give up their breath, and how consumptive
virgins fade out of the world, scarcely reluctant, as if their lovers
were wooing them to a far country.--Tell us, thou fearful woman; tell
us the death-secrets. Fain would I search out the meaning of words
faintly gasped with intermingled sobs and broken sentences
half-audibly spoken between earth and the judgment-seat.

An awful woman! She is the patron-saint of young physicians and the
bosom-friend of old ones. In the mansions where she enters the inmates
provide themselves black garments; the coffin-maker follows her, and
the bell tolls as she comes away from the threshold. Death himself has
met her at so many a bedside that he puts forth his bony hand to greet
Nurse Toothaker. She is an awful woman. And oh, is it conceivable that
this handmaid of human infirmity and affliction--so darkly stained, so
thoroughly imbued with all that is saddest in the doom of mortals--can
ever again be bright and gladsome even though bathed in the sunshine
of eternity? By her long communion with woe has she not forfeited her
inheritance of immortal joy? Does any germ of bliss survive within
her?

Hark! an eager knocking st Nurse Toothaker's door. She starts from her
drowsy reverie, sets aside the empty tumbler and teaspoon, and lights
a lamp at the dim embers of the fire. "Rap, rap, rap!" again, and she
hurries adown the staircase, wondering which of her friends can be at
death's door now, since there is such an earnest messenger at Nurse
Toothaker's. Again the peal resounds just as her hand is on the lock.
"Be quick, Nurse Toothaker!" cries a man on the doorstep. "Old General
Fane is ta