y, or a few flowers, or a new
magazine for me, until the report of his visit came to be an expected
excitement, and varied the dull days wonderfully. Sickness and seclusion
are a new birth to our senses, oftentimes. Not only do we get a real
glimpse of ourselves, undecked and unclothed, but the commonest habits
of life, and the things that have helped to shape them day by day, put
on a sort of strangeness, and come to shake hands with us again, and
make us wonder that they should be just exactly what they are. We get at
the primitive meaning of them, as if we rubbed off the nap of life, and
looked to see how the threads were woven; and they come and go before us
with a sort of old newness that affects us much as if we should meet our
own ghost some time, and wonder if we are really our own or some other
person's housekeeper.

I went through all this, and came out with a stock of small facts
beside,--as, that the paper-hanger had patched the hangings in my
chamber very badly in certain dark spots, (I had got several headaches,
making it out,)--that the chimney was a little too much on one
side,--that certain boards in the entry-floor creaked of their own
accord in the night,--that Neighbor Brown had tucked a few new shingles
into the roof of his barn, so that it seemed to have broken out with
them,--and any number of other things equally important. At length I got
down-stairs, and was allowed to see a few friends. Of course there was
an inundation of them; and each one expected to hear my story, and to
tell a companion one, something like mine, only a little more so. It was
astonishing, the immense number of people that had been hurt with guns.
No wonder I was sick for a day or two afterward. I was more prudent next
time, however, and, as the gossips had got all they wanted, I saw only
my particular friends. Among these my neighbor, the sportsman, insisted
on being reckoned, and after a little hesitation we were obliged to
admit him. I say we,--for, on hearing of my injury, my good cousin, Mary
Mead, had come to nurse and amuse me. She was one of those safe,
serviceable, amiable people, made of just the stuff for a satellite, and
she proved invaluable to me. She was immensely taken with Mr. Ames, too,
(I speak of the younger, for, after the first call of condolence, the
elder sportsman never came,) and to her I left the task of entertaining
him, or rather of doing the honors of the house,--for the gentleman
contrived to