rnations of hope and fear, and the joys and labors of a mother, he
had the happiness of seeing this child of the fair German woman and the
French singer a creature of vigorous health and profound sensibility.

With all the eager feelings of a mother the happy old man watched the
growth of the pretty hair, first down, then silk, at last hair, fine and
soft and clinging to the fingers that caressed it. He often kissed the
little naked feet the toes of which, covered with a pellicle through
which the blood was seen, were like rosebuds. He was passionately fond
of the child. When she tried to speak, or when she fixed her beautiful
blue eyes upon some object with that serious, reflective look which
seems the dawn of thought, and which she ended with a laugh, he would
stay by her side for hours, seeking, with Jordy's help, to understand
the reasons (which most people call caprices) underlying the phenomena
of this delicious phase of life, when childhood is both flower and
fruit, a confused intelligence, a perpetual movement, a powerful desire.

Ursula's beauty and gentleness made her so dear to the doctor that he
would have liked to change the laws of nature in her behalf. He declared
to old Jordy that his teeth ached when Ursula was cutting hers. When old
men love children there is no limit to their passion--they worship them.
For these little beings they silence their own manias or recall a whole
past in their service. Experience, patience, sympathy, the acquisitions
of life, treasures laboriously amassed, all are spent upon that young
life in which they live again; their intelligence does actually take the
place of motherhood. Their wisdom, ever on the alert, is equal to the
intuition of a mother; they remember the delicate perceptions which in
their own mother were divinations, and import them into the exercise of
a compassion which is carried to an extreme in their minds by a sense of
the child's unutterable weakness. The slowness of their movements takes
the place of maternal gentleness. In them, as in children, life is
reduced to its simplest expression; if maternal sentiment makes the
mother a slave, the abandonment of self allows an old man to devote
himself utterly. For these reasons it is not unusual to see children in
close intimacy with old persons. The old soldier, the old abbe, the old
doctor, happy in the kisses and cajoleries of little Ursula, were never
weary of answering her talk and playing with her. Far fr