good-natured lawyer was moved. "Can you work, indeed, my poor girl?
Well, put on your bonnet, and come and talk to my wife."

And that was the new era in Fanny's existence! Her schooling was
stopped. But now life schooled her. Necessity ripened her intellect. And
many a hard eye moistened,--as, seeing her glide with her little basket
of fancy work along the streets, still murmuring her happy and bird-like
snatches of unconnected song--men and children alike said with respect,
in which there was now no contempt, "It's the idiot girl who supports
her blind grandfather!" They called her idiot still!

BOOK IV.

CHAPTER I.

"O that sweet gleam of sunshine on the lake!"
WILSON'S City of the Plague

If, reader, you have ever looked through a solar microscope at the
monsters in a drop of water, perhaps you have wondered to yourself how
things so terrible have been hitherto unknown to you--you have felt a
loathing at the limpid element you hitherto deemed so pure--you have
half fancied that you would cease to be a water-drinker; yet, the next
day you have forgotten the grim life that started before you, with its
countless shapes, in that teeming globule; and, if so tempted by your
thirst, you have not shrunk from the lying crystal, although myriads of
the horrible Unseen are mangling, devouring, gorging each other in the
liquid you so tranquilly imbibe; so is it with that ancestral and master
element called Life. Lapped in your sleek comforts, and lolling on the
sofa of your patent conscience--when, perhaps for the first time, you
look through the glass of science upon one ghastly globule in the waters
that heave around, that fill up, with their succulence, the pores of
earth, that moisten every atom subject to your eyes or handled by your
touch--you are startled and dismayed; you say, mentally, "Can such
things be? I never dreamed of this before! I thought what was
invisible to me was non-existent in itself--I will remember this dread
experiment." The next day the experiment is forgotten.--The Chemist may
purify the Globule--can Science make pure the World?

Turn we now to the pleasant surface, seen in the whole, broad and fair
to the common eye. Who would judge well of God's great designs, if he
could look on no drop pendent from the rose-tree, or sparkling in the
sun, without the help of his solar microscope?

It is ten years after the night on which William Gawtrey perished:--I
transport you, r