ion but the last and
lightest was over. Things in which she saw no significance made them
look very grave, and what she would have counted of some importance to
such as they, drew a mere smile from them. She saw all with bewildered
eyes, much as his neighbors looked upon the strange carriage of Lazarus,
as represented by Robert Browning in the wonderful letter of the Arab
physician. But after she had begun to take note of their sufferings, and
come to mark their calm, their peace, their lighted eyes, their ready
smiles, the patience of their very moans, she began to doubt whether
somehow they might not be touched to finer issues than she. It was not,
however, until after having, with no little reluctance and recoil,
ministered to them upon an occasion in which both were disabled for some
hours, that she began to _feel_ they had a hold upon something unseen,
the firmness of which hold made it hard to believe it closed upon an
unreality. If there was nothing there, then these dwarfs, in the
exercise of their foolish, diseased, distorted fancies, came nearer to
the act of creation than any grandest of poets; for these their
inventions did more than rectify for them the wrongs of their existence,
not only making of their chaos a habitable cosmos, but of themselves
heroic dwellers in the same. Within the charmed circle of this their
well-being, their unceasing ministrations to her wants, their
thoughtfulness about her likings and dislikings, their sweetness of
address, and wistful watching to discover the desire they might satisfy
or the solace they could bring, seemed every moment enticing her. They
soothed the aching of her wounds, mollified with ointment the stinging
rents in her wronged humanity.

At first, when she found they had no set prayers in the house, she
concluded that, for all the talk of the old gnome in the garden, they
were not very religious. But by and by she began to discover that no one
could tell when they might not be praying. At the most unexpected times
she would hear her host's voice somewhere uttering tones of glad
beseeching, of out-poured adoration. One day, when she had a bad
headache, the little man came into her room, and, without a word to her,
kneeled by her bedside, and said, "Father, who through Thy Son knowest
pain, and Who dost even now in Thyself feel the pain of this Thy child,
help her to endure until Thou shall say it is enough, and send it from
her. Let it not overmaster her patienc