ubles had come
early, and, tedious as they seemed, had passed before all her bloom
was fled. She was still fair enough to captivate a bachelor, or with a
widow's cheerful gravity she might have won a widower, stealing into
his heart in the very guise of his dead wife. But the widow Toothaker
had no such projects. By her watchings and continual cares her heart
had become knit to her first husband with a constancy which changed
its very nature and made her love him for his infirmities, and
infirmity for his sake. When the palsied old man was gone, even her
early lover could not have supplied his place. She had dwelt in a
sick-chamber and been the companion of a half-dead wretch till she
could scarcely breathe in a free air and felt ill at ease with the
healthy and the happy. She missed the fragrance of the doctor's stuff.
She walked the chamber with a noiseless footfall. If visitors came in,
she spoke in soft and soothing accents, and was startled and shocked
by their loud voices. Often in the lonesome evening she looked
timorously from the fireside to the bed, with almost a hope of
recognizing a ghastly face upon the pillow. Then went her thoughts
sadly to her husband's grave. If one impatient throb had wronged him
in his lifetime, if she had secretly repined because her buoyant youth
was imprisoned with his torpid age, if ever while slumbering beside
him a treacherous dream had admitted another into her heart,--yet the
sick man had been preparing a revenge which the dead now claimed. On
his painful pillow he had cast a spell around her; his groans and
misery had proved more captivating charms than gayety and youthful
grace; in his semblance Disease itself had won the Rosebud for a
bride, nor could his death dissolve the nuptials. By that indissoluble
bond she had gained a home in every sick-chamber, and nowhere else;
there were her brethren and sisters; thither her husband summoned her
with that voice which had seemed to issue from the grave of Toothaker.
At length she recognized her destiny.

We have beheld her as the maid, the wife, the widow; now we see her in
a separate and insulated character: she was in all her attributes
Nurse Toothaker. And Nurse Toothaker alone, with her own shrivelled
lips, could make known her experience in that capacity. What a history
might she record of the great sicknesses in which she has gone hand in
hand with the exterminating angel! She remembers when the small-pox
hoisted a red bann