ribable grimaces, it was more like being prisoned with some
strange tameless animal, than associating with a human being. Then
there were personal attentions to be rendered which required the nerve
of a hospital nurse; my resolution was so tried, it sometimes fell
dead-sick. These duties should not have fallen on me; a servant, now
absent, had rendered them hitherto, and in the hurry of holiday
departure, no substitute to fill this office had been provided. This
tax and trial were by no means the least I have known in life. Still,
menial and distasteful as they were, my mental pain was far more
wasting and wearing. Attendance on the cretin deprived me often of the
power and inclination to swallow a meal, and sent me faint to the fresh
air, and the well or fountain in the court; but this duty never wrung
my heart, or brimmed my eyes, or scalded my cheek with tears hot as
molten metal.

The cretin being gone, I was free to walk out. At first I lacked
courage to venture very far from the Rue Fossette, but by degrees I
sought the city gates, and passed them, and then went wandering away
far along chaussees, through fields, beyond cemeteries, Catholic and
Protestant, beyond farmsteads, to lanes and little woods, and I know
not where. A goad thrust me on, a fever forbade me to rest; a want of
companionship maintained in my soul the cravings of a most deadly
famine. I often walked all day, through the burning noon and the arid
afternoon, and the dusk evening, and came back with moonrise.

While wandering in solitude, I would sometimes picture the present
probable position of others, my acquaintance. There was Madame Beck at
a cheerful watering-place with her children, her mother, and a whole
troop of friends who had sought the same scene of relaxation. Zelie St.
Pierre was at Paris, with her relatives; the other teachers were at
their homes. There was Ginevra Fanshawe, whom certain of her
connections had carried on a pleasant tour southward. Ginevra seemed to
me the happiest. She was on the route of beautiful scenery; these
September suns shone for her on fertile plains, where harvest and
vintage matured under their mellow beam. These gold and crystal moons
rose on her vision over blue horizons waved in mounted lines.

But all this was nothing; I too felt those autumn suns and saw those
harvest moons, and I almost wished to be covered in with earth and
turf, deep out of their influence; for I could not live in their light,