"How long ago was that?" "The pleurisy? About the beginning of June. The Doctor said last week he 'could scarcely discover a vestige of it.' And now, Katy," continued kind, cheery Mrs. Physick, "you see, your coming back has put her in the best of spirits; and you and the Doctor and I are all going to take the best of care of her; and so we may all hope the best."

"The best of care"? Ah, there was little doubt of that! But even "good spirits" who could hope to see Fanny enjoying them for any length of time, till she had done with time? Good, uncomplaining, patient, I had always seen her, happy, how seldom! - when, indeed, till now? There was not enough of earth about her for her to thrive and bloom.

My mother, I believe, used to attribute in part to Fanny's early training her early joylessness. In her early days, so at least I have understood, -it was thought right even by some good people of our "persuasion," to lose no opportunity of treating the little natural waywardnesses of children with a severity which would now be called ferocity. Mamma could never have practised this herself; but perhaps she suffered it to be practised to a greater extent than she would have consented to endure, had she foreseen the consequences. My poor father must have been inexperienced, too; and I suppose his nerves, between sickness and poverty, might at times be in such a state that he scarcely knew what he did.

I was four years younger than Fanny, and know nothing about it, except a very little at second-hand. But at any rate I have often heard my mother say, with a glance at her, and a gravity as if some sad association enforced the lesson on her mind, that it was one of the first duties of those who undertook the charge of children to watch over their cheerfulness, and a most important rule, never, if it was possible to put it off, so much as to reprimand them when one's own balance

was at all disturbed. This was a rule that she never to my knowledge broke; though she was naturally rather a highstrung person, as I think the pleasantest and most generous people one meets with generally are.

From whatever cause or causes, to return to Fanny, - she grew up, not fierce, sullen, nor yet hypocritical, but timid and distrustful, miserably sensitive and anxious, and morbidly conscientious.

There was another pleasure in store for her, however; for, the afternoon following that of my return, Mrs. Julia, looking out as usual for her husband, - with messages from four different alarmingly or alarmed sick persons, requesting him to proceed without delay in four different directions, saw him at length driving down the road with such unprofessional slowness that she feared some accident to himself or his harness. When he came before the door, the cause appeared. It was a handsome Bath chair, with a basket of strawberries on the floor and a large nosegay on the seat, fastened to the back of his gig, and safely towed by it. "What is that for?" cried I from Fanny's window.

"Fanny's coach," said he, looking up. "Miss Dudley has sent it to be taken care of for her. She does not want it herself for the present; and you can draw your dolly out in it every fine day.”

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"O," cried Fanny, sitting upright on the couch by the window, - where she spent the greater part of the day, - to see for herself, with the tears in her eyes. "O, how lovely! That is the very kindest thing she has done yet; -and you don't know how she keeps sending me everything, Katy!"

"Miss Dudley? Who is she?"

"O, don't you know? The great naturalist's sister. He lives in that beautiful place, on the shore, in the large stone cottage. The ground was broken for it before you went to Greenville. She is very sick, I am afraid, very kind, I am sure. I never saw her. She has heard about me. I am afraid

the Doctor told her. I hope she does not think I meant he should." "Of course, dear, she does not." "Do you really think so?" "Certainly." "Why?"

Why, I know I should not like being begged of in that underhand way myself; and if I did not like it, I might send something once, but after that I should never keep on sending." "I am very glad you think so; for I like her kindness, though I scarcely like to have her show it in this way, because I am afraid I can never do anything for her. But I hope she does like to send; for Dr. Physick says she always asks after me, almost before he can after her, and looks very much pleased if she hears that I have been So. I suppose the Doctor will think it is too late to take me down to-night. Katy, don't you want to go and see the wagon, and tell me about it, and pour the strawberries into a great dish on the tea-table, and all of you have some, and bring up the flowers when you come back after tea?"

When I came back with the flowers, Fanny smiled rather pensively, and did not ask me about the chair.

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Fanny," said I, "the Doctor says you may go out to-morrow forenoon, and stay as long as you like, if it is fair; and the sun is going down as red as a Baldwin apple. The chair is contrived so, with springs and the cushions, that you can lie down in it, as flat as you do on your sofa, when you are tired of sitting up."

"O Katy," cried she, with a little quiver in her voice, for she was too weak to bear anything, "I have been seeing how inconsiderate I was! To think of letting you exert and strain yourself in that way!"

east, and west after all the other doctors. I hope you won't mention it, said I to the horse; but Fanny is always getting up some kind of a row. But there is Katy now,- Katy is a meek person, and always does as she is bid. She has been cooped up too much, and bleached her own roses with teaching the Greenville misses to sickly o'er with the pale cast of thought. Katy needs gentle exercise. So does Deacon Lardner." Deacon Lardner was the fat inhabitant of the town, and ill of the dropsy. "I will send Katy out a-walking, with Deacon Lardner in Miss Dudley's chair."

I laughed. Fanny smiled. The Doctor saw his advantage, and followed it up. "Julia, my dear, get my apothecary's scales out of the office. Put an ounce weight into one, and Fanny into the other. Then put the ounce weight into the chair. If Katy can draw that, she can draw Fanny."

This time, it was poor Fanny who had the laugh to herself.

The next day, the Doctor carried her down stairs, as soon as she could bear it after her breakfast, and left her on a sofa, in the little parlor, to rest. About ten o'clock, he came back from his early rounds. I was dressed and waiting for him, with Fanny's bonnet and shawl ready. I put them on her, while he drew out the chair from its safe stable in the hall. Once again he took her up; and thus by easy stages we got her into "her coach." I pulled, and he pushed it, "to give me a start." How easy and light and strong it was! How delighted were both she and I!

Fanny was too easily alarmed to enjoy driving much, even when she was well; and she had not walked out for weeks. During that time, the slow, late spring had turned into midsummer; and the mere change from a sick-room to the fresh, outer world is always so very great! For me, it was the first going abroad since my return to Beverly. We went in the sun till my charge's little snowdrop hands were warm, and then drew up under the shade of an elm, on a little airy knoll that com

manded a distant view of the sea, and was fanned by a soft air, which helped poor Fanny's breathing. She now insisted on my resting myself; and I turned the springs back and arranged the cushions so that she could lie down, took a new handkerchief of my guardian's from my pocket, and hemmed it, as I sat at her side on a stone, while she mused and dozed. When she awoke, I gave her her luncheon from a convenient little box in the chair, and drew her home by dinner-time.

In this way we spent much of the month of July - shall I say it? agreeably. Nobody will believe it, who has not felt or seen the marvellous relief afforded by an entire change of scene and occupation to a person tried as I had been. If I had but " one idea," that idea was now Fanny. Instinctively in part, and partly of set purpose, I postponed to her every other consideration and thought. It was delightful to me to be able, in my turn, to take her to one after another of the dear old haunts, in wood or on beach, where she had often led me, when a child, to play. I always did love to have something to take care of; and the care of Fanny wore upon me little. She was the most considerate of invalids.

Besides, she was better, or at any rate I thought so, after she began to go out in Miss Dudley's chair. Her appetite improved; her nerves grew more firm; and her cough was sometimes so quiet at night that her laudanum would stand on her little table in the morning, just as it was dropped for her the evening before.

Not only were my spirits amended by the fresh air in which, by Dr. Physick's strict orders, I lived with her through the twenty-four hours, but my health too. He had declared her illness to be "probably owing in great part to the foul atmosphere in which," he found, "she slept"; and now she added that, since she had known the comfort of fresh air at night, she should be very sorry ever to give it up. In windy weather she VOL. XVIII. - NO. 109.

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had a large folding-screen, and in raw, more blankets and a little fire.

Besides the chair, another thing came in our way which gave pleasure to both of us, though it was not very pleasantly ushered in, as its pioneer was a long visit from Fanny's old "Sabbath schoolma'am," Miss Mehitable Truman, who would come up stairs. Towards the close of this visit her errand came out. It was to inquire whether "Fanny would n't esteem it a privilege to knit one or two of her sets of toilet napkins for Miss Mehitable's table at the Orphans' Fair, jest by little and little, as she could gether up her failin' strength." Fanny could not promise the napkins, since, luckily for her, she was past speech from exhaustion, as I was with indignation; and Miss Truman, hearing the Doctor's boots creak below, showed the better part of valor, and departed.

The next day, it rained. We were kept in-doors; and Fanny could not be easy till I had looked up her cotton and knitting-needles. She could not be easy afterwards, either; for they made her side ache; and when Dr. Physick paid his morning visit, he took them away.

I knew she would be sorry to have nothing to give to that fair. It was one of the few rules of life which my mother had recommended us to follow, never from false shame either to give or to withhold. "If you are asked to give," she would say, "to any object, and are not satisfied that it is a good one, but give to it for fear that somebody will think you stingy, that is not being faithful stewards. But when you do meet with a worthy object, always give, if you honestly can. Even if you have no more than a cent to give, then give a cent; and do not care if the Pharisees see you. That is more than the poor widow in the Gospels gave ";

how fond she always was of that story!-"and you remember who, besides the Pharisees, saw her, and what he said? His objects would not have to go begging so long as they do now, if every one would follow her example."

From pride often, and sometimes from indolence, I am afraid I had broken that rule; but Fanny, I rather think, never had; and now I would try to help her to keep it.

My mother's paint-box was on a shelf in our closet, with three sheets of her drawing-paper still in it. Painting flowers was one of her chief opiates to lull the cares of her careful life. I think a person can scarcely have too many such, provided they are kept in their proper place. I have often seen her, when sadly tired or tried, sit down, with a moisture that was more like rain than dew in her eyes, and paint it all away, till she seemed to be looking sunshine over her lifelike blossoms. Then she would pin them up against the wall, for a week or two, for us to enjoy them with her; and, afterwards, she would give them away to any one who had done her any favor. Her spirit was in that like Fanny's, - she shrank so painfully from the weight of any obligation! She wished to teach me to paint, when I was a child. I wished to learn; and many of her directions were still fresh in my memory. But the inexperienced eye and uncertain hand of thirteen disheartened me. I thought I had no talent. My mother was not accustomed to force any task upon me in my play-hours. The undertaking was given up.

But I suppose many persons, like me not precocious in the nursery or the school-room, but naturally fond, as I was passionately, of beautiful forms and colors, would be surprised, if they would try their baffled skill again in aftertimes, to find how much the years had been unwittingly preparing for them, in the way of facility and accuracy of outline and tint, while they supposed themselves to be exclusively occupied with other matters. the physiologists call "unconscious cerebration" has been at work. Scatter the seeds of any accomplishment in the mind of a little man or woman, and, even if you leave them quite untended, you may in some after summer or autumn find the fruit growing wild.

What

Accordingly, when, within the last twelvemonth, I had been called upon to teach the elements of drawing in my school, it astonished me to discover the ease with which I could either sketch or copy. And now it occurred to me that perhaps, if I would take enough time and pains, I could paint something worthy of a place on Miss Mehitable's table.

Fanny's gladness at the plan, and interest in watching the work, in her own enforced inaction, were at once reward and stimulus. I succeeded, better than we either of us expected, in copying the frontispiece of a "picturebook," as Dr. Physick called it, which he had brought up from his office to amuse her. It was a scientific volume, sent him by the author, — an old fellowstudent, from the other side of the world. Lovely ferns, flowers, shells, birds, butterflies, and insects, that surrounded him there, were treated further on separately, in rigid sequence; but as if to make himself amends by a little play for so much work, he had not been able to resist the temptation of grouping them all together on one glowing and fascinating page. I framed my copy as tastefully as I could, in a simple but harmonious passe-partout, and sent it to Miss Mehitable, with Fanny's love. Fanny's gratitude was touching; and as for me, I felt quite as if I had found a free ticket to an indefinitely long private picture-gallery.

Fanny's satisfaction was still more complete after the fair, when Miss Mehitable reported that the painting had brought in what we both thought quite a handsome sum. "It was a dreadful shame," she added, "you had n't sent two of 'em; for at noon, while I was home, jest takin' a bite, my niece, Letishy, from Noo York, had another grand nibble for that one after 't was purchased. Letishy said a kind o' poor, pale-lookin', queer-lookin' lady, who she never saw before, in an elegint camel's-hair,"-("Poor-lookin', in a camel's-hair shawl!" was my inward ejaculation; "don't I wish, ma'am, I could catch you and 'Letishy' in my

composition class, once!") "she come up to the table an' saw that, an' seemed to feel quite taken aback to find she'd lost her chance at it. Letishy showed her some elegint shell-vases with artificial roses; but that would n't do. I told Letishy," continued Miss Mehitable, "that she'd ought to ha' been smart an' taken down the lady's name; an' then I could ha' got Kathryne to paint her another. But you mu't do it now, Kathryne, an' put it up in the bookseller's winder; an' then, if she's anybody that belongs hereabouts, she 'l! be likely to snap at it, an' the money can go right into the orphans' fund all the same."

"Much obliged," thought I, "for the hint as to the bookseller's shop-window; but I rather think that, if the money comes, the orphan's fund that it ought to 'go right into' this time is Fanny's."

For my orphan's fund from my months of school-keeping, not ample when I first came back, was smaller now. Fanny's illness was necessarily, in some respects, an expensive one. I believed, indeed, and do believe, that it was a gratification to Dr. Physick to lavish upon her, to the utmost of his ability, everything that could do her good, as freely as if she had been his own child or sister. But it could not be agreeable to her, while we had a brother, to be a burden to a man un connected with us by blood, young in his profession, though rising, and still probably earning not very much more than his wife's and his own daily bread from day to day, and owing us nothing but a debt of gratitude for another's kindnesses, which another man in his place would probably have said that "he paid as he went."

In plain English, the tie between us arose simply from the fact that he boarded with my mother, when he was a poor and unformed medical student. He always said that she was the best friend he had in his solitary youth, and that no one could tell how different all his after-life might have been but for her. She was naturally generous; yet

she was a just woman; and I know that, while we were unprovided for, she could not have given, as the world appraises giving, much to him. Still "she did what she could." He paid her his board; but she gave him a home. After she found that his lodgings were unwarmed, she invited him to share her fireside of a winter evening; and, though she would not deprive us of our chat with one another and with her, she taught us to speak in low tones, and never to him, when we saw him at his studies. When they were over, and he was tired and in want of some amusement, she afforded him one at once cheap, innocent, and inexhaustible, and sang to him as she still toiled on at her unresting needle, night after night, ballad after ballad, in her wild, sweet, rich voice. He was very fond of music, though, as he said, he "could only whistle for it." It was the custom then among our neighbors to keep Saturday evening strictly as a part of "the Sabbath." It was her half-holiday, however, for works of charity and mercy; and she would often bid him bring her any failing articles of his scanty wardrobe then, and say that she would mend them for him if he would read to her. Her taste was naturally fine, and trained by regular and wellchosen Sunday reading; and she had the tact to select for these occasions books that won the mind of the intellectual though uncultivated youth by their eloquence, until they won his heart by their holiness. Moreover, she had been gently bred, and could give good advice, in manners as well as morals, when it was asked for, and withhold it when it was not.

The upshot of it all was, that he loved her like a mother; and now the sentiment was deepened by a shade of filial remorse, which I could never quite dispel, though, as often as he gave me any chance, I tried. The last year of my mother's life was the first of his married life. His father-in-law hired, at the end of the town opposite to ours, a furnished house for him and his wife. My mother called upon