llender; pray!"

Phillida laid down the Bible and solemnly knelt by the invalid, taking
hold of one of her hands. It would have been impossible to listen to the
prayer of one so passionately sincere and so believingly devout without
falling into sympathy with it. To the bed-ridden and long-despairing
Wilhelmina it made God seem something other than she had ever thought
him. An hour before she could have believed that God might be persuaded
to take her life in answer to prayer, but not that he could be brought
to restore her. The moment that Phillida began to pray, a new God
appeared to her mind--Phillida's God. Wilhelmina followed the action of
Phillida's mind as a hypnotized subject does that of the dominant agent:
as Phillida believed, so she believed; Phillida's confidence became
hers, and the weak nerves tingled all the way from the nerve-centers
with new life.

"Now, Wilhelmina," said Phillida at length, slowly rising from her knees
and looking steadily into the invalid's eyes, "the good Lord will make
you whole. Rise up and sit upon the bed, believing with all your heart."

In a sort of ecstasy the invalid set to work to obey. There was a
hideous trick of legerdemain in the last generation, by which an
encoffined skeleton was made to struggle to its feet. Something like
this took place as Mina's feeble arms were brought into the most violent
effort to assist her to rise. But a powerful emotion, a tremendous hope,
stimulated the languid nerves; the almost disused muscles were
galvanized into power; and Wilhelmina succeeded at length in sitting
upright without support for the first time in years. When she perceived
this actually accomplished she cried out: "O God! I am getting well!"

Wilhelmina's mother had come to the top of the stairs just as Phillida
had begun to pray. She paused without the door and listened to the
prayer and to what followed. She now burst into the room to see her
daughter sitting up on the side of her couch; and then there were
embraces and tears, and ejaculations of praise to God in German and in
broken English.

"Sit there, Mina, and believe with all your heart," said Phillida, who
was exteriorly the calmest of the three; "I will come back soon."

Wilhelmina did as she was bidden. The shock of excitement thus prolonged
was overcoming the sluggishness of her nerves. The mother could not
refrain from calling in a neighbor who was passing by the open door, and
the news of Mina's partial