she could not close her eyes in sleep unless he sat by her side,
holding her hand in his, and gently stroking it. He spent weeks of nights
by her bedside in this way. At any hour of the day, a summons might come
from her; and, whatever might be his engagement, it was instantly laid
aside,--laid aside, too, with cheerfulness and alacrity. At times, all his
college duties would be suspended on her account; and his own specialties
of scientific research, in which he was beginning to win recognition even
from the great masters of science in Europe, were very early laid aside
for ever. It must have been a great pang to him,--this relinquishment of
fame, and of what is dearer to the true scientific man than all fame, the
joys of discovery; but no man ever heard from his lips an allusion to the
sacrifice. The great telescope, with which he had so many nights swept the
heavens, still stood in his garden observatory; but it was little used
except for recreation, and for the pleasure and instruction of his boy.
Yet no one would have dreamed, from the hearty joy with which he used it
for these purposes, that it had ever been to him the token and the
instrument of the great hope of his heart. The resolute cheer of this
man's life pervaded the whole atmosphere of his house. Spite of the
perpetual shadow of the invalid's darkened room, spite of the inevitable
circumscribing of narrow means, Parson Dorrance's cottage was the
pleasantest house in the place, was the house to which all the
townspeople took strangers with pride, and was the house which strangers
never forgot. There was always a new book, or a new print, or a new
flower, or a new thought which the untiring mind had just been shaping;
and there were always and ever the welcome and the sympathy of a man who
loved men because he loved God, and who loved God with an affection as
personal in its nature as the affection with which he loved a man.

Year after year, classes of young men went away from this college, having
for four years looked on the light of this goodness. Said I not well that
few lives have ever been lived which have left such a stamp on a
community? No man could be so gross that he would utterly fail to feel its
purity, no man so stupid that he could not see its grandeur of
self-sacrifice; and to souls of a fibre fine enough to be touched to the
quick by its exaltation, it was-a kindling fire for ever.

In the twenty-seventh year of her married life, and near th