ollow the child's footsteps and be always
inherent in her very presence, as she moved to and fro in the sick room.
All the little difficulties of communicating with her and teaching her,
which her misfortune rendered inevitable, and which might sometime
have been felt as tedious by others, were so many distinct sources of
happiness, so many exquisite occupations of once-weary time to Mrs.
Blyth. All the friends of the family declared that the child had
succeeded where doctors, and medicines, and luxuries, and the sufferer's
own courageous resignation had hitherto failed--for she had succeeded in
endowing Mrs. Blyth with a new life. And they were right. A fresh object
for the affections of the heart and the thoughts of the mind, is a fresh
life for every feeling and thinking human being, in sickness even as
well as in health.

In this sense, indeed, the child brought fresh life with her to all who
lived in her new home--to the servants, as well as to the master and
mistress. The cloud had rarely found its way into that happy dwelling
in former days: now the sunshine seemed fixed there for ever. No more
beautiful and touching proof of what the heroism of patient dispositions
and loving hearts can do towards guiding human existence, unconquered
and unsullied, through its hardest trials, could be found anywhere than
was presented by the aspect of the painter's household. Here were two
chief members of one little family circle, afflicted by such incurable
bodily calamity as it falls to the lot of but few human beings to
suffer--yet here were no sighs, no tears, no vain repinings with each
new morning, no gloomy thoughts to set woe and terror watching by the
pillow at night. In this homely sphere, life, even in its frailest
aspects, was still greater than its greatest trials; strong to conquer
by virtue of its own innocence and purity, its simple unworldly
aspirations, its self-sacrificing devotion to the happiness and the
anxieties of others.

As the course of her education proceeded, many striking peculiarities
became developed in Madonna's disposition, which seemed to be all more
or less produced by the necessary influence of her affliction on
the formation of her character. The social isolation to which that
affliction condemned her, the solitude of thought and feeling into which
it forced her, tended from an early period to make her mind remarkably
self-reliant, for so young a girl. Her first impression of strangers
se