illie was too sick and suffering for sentiment. It
requires a certain amount of bodily strength and soundness to feel
emotions of love; and, for a long time, the little Lillie had to be
banished from the mother's apartment, as she lay weary in her
darkened room, with only a consciousness of a varied succession of
disagreeables and discomforts. Her general impression about herself
was, that she was a much abused and most unfortunate woman; and that
all that could ever be done by the utmost devotion of everybody in the
house was insufficient to make up for such trials as had come upon
her.

A nursing mother was found for the little Lillie in the person of a
goodly Irish woman, fair, fat, and loving; and the real mother had
none of those awakening influences, from the resting of the little
head in her bosom, and the pressure of the little helpless fingers,
which magnetize into existence the blessed power of love.

She had wasted in years of fashionable folly, and in a life led only
for excitement and self-gratification, all the womanly power, all the
capability of motherly giving and motherly loving that are the glory
of womanhood. Kathleen, the white-armed, the gentle-bosomed, had all
the simple pleasures, the tendernesses, the poetry of motherhood;
while poor, faded, fretful Lillie had all the prose--the sad, hard,
weary prose--of sickness and pain, unglorified by love.

John did not well know what to do with himself in Lillie's darkened
room; where it seemed to him he was always in the way, always doing
something wrong; where his feet always seemed too large and heavy, and
his voice too loud; and where he was sure, in his anxious desire to
be still and gentle, to upset something, or bring about some general
catastrophe, and to go out feeling more like a criminal than ever.

The mother and the nurse, stationed there like a pair of chief
mourners, spoke in tones which experienced feminine experts seem to
keep for occasions like these, and which, as Hawthorne has said, give
an effect as if the voice had been dyed black. It was a comfort and
relief to pass from the funeral gloom to the little pink-ruffled
chamber among the cherry-trees, where the birds were singing and the
summer breezes blowing, and the pretty Kathleen was crooning her Irish
songs, and invoking the holy virgin and all the saints to bless the
"darlin'" baby.

"An' it's a blessin' they brings wid 'em to a house, sir; the angels
comes down wid 'em. We c