han his seeing competitors. A friend and pupil sat by his side in the
winter evenings and supplemented his weakness, helping and learning
alternately, while his blind master's skill filled him with wonder and
despair. The years of struggle for perfection had not been wasted; and
though the eye that once detected the deviation of a hair's breadth
could no longer tell the true from the false, yet nature had been busy
with her divine work of compensation. The one sense stricken with death,
she poured floods of new life and vigor into the others. Touch became
something more than the stupid, empty grasp of things we seeing mortals
know, and in place of the two eyes he had lost he now had ten in every
finger-tip. As for odors, let other folks be proud of smelling musk and
lavender, but let him tell you by a quiver of the nostrils the various
kinds of so-called scentless flowers, and let him bend his ear and
interpret secrets that the universe is ever whispering to us who are
pent in partial deafness because, forsooth, we see.

He often paused to hear Lydia's low, soothing tones and the boy's
weak treble. Anthony had said to him once, "Miss Butterfield is very
beautiful, isn't she, Davy? You haven't painted me a picture of her yet.
How does she look?"

Davy was stricken at first with silent embarrassment. He was a truthful
child, but in this he could no more have told the whole truth than
he could have cut off his hand. He was knit to Lyddy by every tie of
gratitude and affection. He would sit for hours with his expectant face
pressed against the window-pane, and when he saw her coming down the
shady road he was filled with a sense of impending comfort and joy.

"NO," he said hesitatingly, "she isn't pretty, nunky, but she's sweet
and nice and dear, Everything on her shines, it's so clean; and when
she comes through the trees, with her white apron and her purple calico
dress, your heart jumps, because you know she's going to make everything
pleasant. Her hair has a pretty wave in it, and her hand is soft on your
forehead; and it's most worth while being sick just to have her in the
house."

Meanwhile, so truly is "praise our fructifying sun," Lydia bloomed into
a hundred hitherto unsuspected graces of mind and heart and speech.
A sly sense of humor woke into life, and a positive talent for
conversation, latent hitherto because she had never known any one who
cared to drop a plummet into the crystal springs of her consciousn