The miasm which must have filled the air of the place from so many
natural and artificial bodies of fresh water showed itself in low
fevers, which were not so common as ague, but common enough. The only
long sickness that my boy could remember was intermittent fever, which
seemed to last many weeks, and which was a kind of bewilderment rather
than a torment. When it was beginning he appeared to glide down the
stairs at school without touching the steps with his feet, and
afterwards his chief trouble was in not knowing, when he slept, whether
he had really been asleep or not. But there was rich compensation for
this mild suffering in the affectionate petting which a sick boy always
gets from his mother when his malady takes him from his rough little
world and gives him back helpless to her tender arms again. Then she
makes everything in the house yield to him; none of the others are
allowed to tease him or cross him in the slightest thing. They have to
walk lightly; and when he is going to sleep, if they come into the room,
they have got to speak in a whisper. She sits by his bed and fans him;
she smooths the pillow and turns its cool side up under his hot and
aching head; she cooks dainty dishes to tempt his sick appetite, and
brings them to him herself. She is so good and kind and loving that he
cannot help having some sense of it all, and feeling how much better she
is than anything on earth. His little ruffian world drifts far away from
him. He hears the yells and shouts of the boys in the street without a
pang of envy or longing; in his weakness, his helplessness, he becomes a
gentle and innocent child again; and heaven descends to him out of his
mother's heart.

XXI.

LAST DAYS.

I HAVE already told that my boy's father would not support General
Taylor, the Whig candidate for President, because he believed him, as
the hero of a pro-slavery war, to be a friend of slavery. At this time
he had a large family of little children, and he had got nothing beyond
a comfortable living from the newspaper which he had published for eight
years; if he must give that up, he must begin life anew heavily
burdened. Perhaps he thought it need not come to his giving up his
paper, that somehow affairs might change. But his newspaper would have
gone to nothing in his hands if he had tried to publish it as a Free
Soil paper after the election of the Whig candidate; so he sold it, and
began to cast about for some other busine