he yet loved--truly and devotedly; and without his realizing what
evil influence could have fallen like a blight upon all his hopes, those
hopes were destroyed. He was not broken-hearted, as he had believed
himself to be while laboring under more serious bodily illness: he was
only _sad_; but that sadness, he believed, would remain during life. Ah,
well!--if life and health were still to be his, he must nerve himself to
meet whatever of sorrow or disappointment might come, and bear what he
could not conquer. So thought he as they rode homeward, when John for a
time ceased that constant stream of chat for which a wounded arm did
not in the least disable him. He little knew how a lumbering stage was
at the same hour setting down a dusty little woman in a gray
travelling-dress, at a country village hundreds of miles away, whose
acts and words were to produce so marked an effect on his own destiny.

These details of very ordinary events in the Crawford family, which
followed the re-union of the two brothers, may seem very uninteresting
and common-place; and yet they are necessary for the possible
understanding of what so soon followed. For the letting in of sunshine
on a dark place may not only warm and illumine that place for a time but
make the continuance of sunshine a necessity. And going out into the
sunshine may have the same effect. The school-boy, once let out for his
"play-spell," may have great objection to spending so many hours,
thereafter, over his books in the dusky school-room; and Nature, after a
time, may develop the fact that he needed the reviving and strengthening
education of the outer world, much more imperatively than the additional
education of the brain which he would have acquired within the sound of
the teacher's voice. Nature's hygiene is very little understood, but it
is at the same time very simple and very powerful. The _sun_ contains
the great mystery of health and hardihood, and the man who carefully
shuts himself away from its rays is arranging for the same kind of
existence which the unfortunate plant is forced to experience, growing
under the shelter of a rotten log, succulent, tender and perishable. The
fire-worship of the Ghebers was founded upon common-sense; and no doubt
the first kneeling adoration of the sun-worshippers both of Persia and
Peru, was paid by some poor fellow who had been sick, attenuated and
miserable, who had finally crawled out into the sunshine after long
confinemen