as to their ailments. The confidence in the healing
power of her prayers among the tenement people was not based altogether
on the betterment of some of those for whom she prayed. Knowing her
patient long-suffering with the evil she contended against, they
reasoned, in advance of proof, that her prayers ought to have virtue in
them. The reverence for her was enhanced by a report, which began to
circulate about this time, that she had refused to marry a rich man in
order to keep up her labor among the poor. Rumor is always an artist,
and tradition, which is but fossil rumor, is the great saint-maker. The
nature and extent of Phillida's sacrifice were amplified and adapted
until people came to say that Miss Callender had refused a young
millionaire because he wished her not to continue her work in
Mackerelville. This pretty story did not mitigate the notoriety which
was an ingredient of her pain.

In spite of the sedative of labor and the consolation of altruism, Poe's
raven would croak in her ears through hours spent in solitude. In the
evenings she found herself from habit and longing listening for the
door-bell, and its alarm would always give her a moment of fluttering
expectation, followed by a period of revulsion. Once the bell rang at
about the hour of Millard's habitual coming, and Phillida sat in that
state in which one expects without having reason to expect anything in
particular until the servant brought her a card bearing the legend,
"Eleanor Arabella Bowyer, Christian Scientist and Metaphysical
Practitioner."

"Eleanor Arabella Bowyer," she said, reading it to her mother as they
sat in the front basement below the parlor. "Who is she? I've never
heard of her."

"I don't know, Phillida. I don't seem to remember any Bowyers."

"Where is the lady, Sarah?" asked Phillida of the servant.

"She is in the parlor, Miss."

Phillida rose and went up-stairs. She found awaiting her a woman rather
above medium height. Phillida noted a certain obtrusiveness about the
bony substructure of her figure, a length and breadth of framework
never quite filled out as it was meant to be, so that the joints and
angles of her body showed themselves with the effect of headlands and
rocky promontories. She had a sallow complexion and a nose that was
retrousse, with a prompt outward and upward thrust about the lower half
of it, accompanied by a tendency to thinness as it approached its
termination, quite out of agreement with the