I have spent my forty years in the wilderness, feeding on
wrath and bitterness and tears. Forgive me, Lord, and give me one
more vision of the blessed land of Canaan, even if I never dwell
there."
CHAPTER VI
"Nor less the eternal poles
Of tendency distribute souls.
There need no vows to bind
Whom not each other seek, but find."
EMERSON's Celestial Love.
Davy's sickness was a lingering one. Mrs. Buck came for two or three
hours a day, but Lyddy was the self-installed angel of the house; and
before a week had passed the boy's thin arms were around her neck,
his head on her loving shoulder, and his cheek pressed against hers.
Anthony could hear them talk, as he sat in the kitchen busy at his
work. Musical instruments were still brought him to repair, though
less frequently than of yore, and he could still make many parts of
violins far better than his seeing competitors. A friend and pupil
sat by his side in the winter evenings and supplemented his weakness,
helping and learning alternately, while his blind master's skill
filled him with wonder and despair. The years of struggle for
perfection had not been wasted; and though the eye that once detected
the deviation of a hair's breadth could no longer tell the true from
the false, yet nature had been busy with her divine work of
compensation. The one sense stricken with death, she poured floods
of new life and vigour into the others. Touch became something more
than the stupid, empty grasp of things we seeing mortals know, and in
place of the two eyes he had lost he now had ten in every finger-tip.
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