persons in sound
health.

Under the shelter of her uncle's roof he had lain for weeks, sick of a
fever. He was saved alive, but so as by fire. This girl waited on him
through that time as a servant. He was thrown chiefly on her hands,--no
other person could be spared to wait on the poor stranger. She comforted
him. Her ways were not refined and gentle as if she had been taught
refinement and tenderness by precept or example. She had strong
good-sense. So far as she understood his orders, she obeyed them. When
he could not give any, she made use of her own judgment, and sought
first of all his comfort. She was kind. In her rough honesty and
unwearied attention he found cause for gratitude.

Rising for the first time from his bed of sickness, he would have fallen
if she had not lifted him and laid him back upon his bed. When he became
strong enough to stand, but not without support, she gave him that
support. She assisted him from the little room, and the little house
when the walls became intolerable to him, and it happened to be in the
early morning of a day so magnificent that it seemed another could never
be made like it. He could not forget how the world looked that morning;
how the waters shone; how the islands stood about; how the surrounding
hills were arrayed in purple glory; how the birds sang. This land to
which he was a stranger, which he had seen before only on that night
when he came in the dark to her uncle's door, looked like Paradise to
him; he gazed and gazed, and silent tears ran down his pale face through
the furrows of his wasted cheeks. She saw them shining in his beard, and
said something to soothe him in a comforting way, as any woman would
have spoken who saw any creature in weakness and pain. The manner or the
word, whatever it was, expressed a superiority of health, if of no other
kind, and he was in no condition to investigate either its quality or
its degree.

When, with voice feeble and broken as a sick child's, he thanked her for
all she had done, and she answered that it was nothing but a pleasure,
and he need not thank her, he did not forthwith forget that she had
watched day and night over him for nearly two months; that many a time
weariness so overpowered her that she sat and slept in the broad
daylight, and looked paler than when he lay like a dead weight on her
hands.

He remembered in court, and could not deny it, that when, believing that
this was destiny as it was also pleasu