dared not know. If they knocked at my heart sometimes, an inhospitable
bar to admission must be inwardly drawn. When they turned away thus
rejected, tears sad enough sometimes flowed: but it could not be
helped: I dared not give such guests lodging. So mortally did I fear
the sin and weakness of presumption.

Religious reader, you will preach to me a long sermon about what I have
just written, and so will you, moralist: and you, stern sage: you,
stoic, will frown; you, cynic, sneer; you, epicure, laugh. Well, each
and all, take it your own way. I accept the sermon, frown, sneer, and
laugh; perhaps you are all right: and perhaps, circumstanced like me,
you would have been, like me, wrong. The first month was, indeed, a
long, black, heavy month to me.

The cretin did not seem unhappy. I did my best to feed her well and
keep her warm, and she only asked food and sunshine, or when that
lacked, fire. Her weak faculties approved of inertion: her brain, her
eyes, her ears, her heart slept content; they could not wake to work,
so lethargy was their Paradise.

Three weeks of that vacation were hot, fair, and dry, but the fourth
and fifth were tempestuous and wet. I do not know why that change in
the atmosphere made a cruel impression on me, why the raging storm and
beating rain crushed me with a deadlier paralysis than I had
experienced while the air had remained serene; but so it was; and my
nervous system could hardly support what it had for many days and
nights to undergo in that huge empty house. How I used to pray to
Heaven for consolation and support! With what dread force the
conviction would grasp me that Fate was my permanent foe, never to be
conciliated. I did not, in my heart, arraign the mercy or justice of
God for this; I concluded it to be a part of his great plan that some
must deeply suffer while they live, and I thrilled in the certainty
that of this number, I was one.

It was some relief when an aunt of the cretin, a kind old woman, came
one day, and took away my strange, deformed companion. The hapless
creature had been at times a heavy charge; I could not take her out
beyond the garden, and I could not leave her a minute alone: for her
poor mind, like her body, was warped: its propensity was to evil. A
vague bent to mischief, an aimless malevolence, made constant vigilance
indispensable. As she very rarely spoke, and would sit for hours
together moping and mowing, and distorting her features with
indesc