when she could not close her eyes in sleep unless he sat by her side, holding her hand in his, and gently stroking it.  He spent weeks of nights by her bedside in this way.  At any hour of the day, a summons might come from her; and, whatever might be his engagement, it was instantly laid aside,—­laid aside, too, with cheerfulness and alacrity.  At times, all his college duties would be suspended on her account; and his own specialties of scientific research, in which he was beginning to win recognition even from the great masters of science in Europe, were very early laid aside for ever.  It must have been a great pang to him,—­this relinquishment of fame, and of what is dearer to the true scientific man than all fame, the joys of discovery; but no man ever heard from his lips an allusion to the sacrifice.  The great telescope, with which he had so many nights swept the heavens, still stood in his garden observatory; but it was little used except for recreation, and for the pleasure and instruction of his boy.  Yet no one would have dreamed, from the hearty joy with which he used it for these purposes, that it had ever been to him the token and the instrument of the great hope of his heart.  The resolute cheer of this man’s life pervaded the whole atmosphere of his house.  Spite of the perpetual shadow of the invalid’s darkened room, spite of the inevitable circumscribing of narrow means, Parson Dorrance’s cottage was the pleasantest house in the place, was the house to which all the townspeople took strangers with pride, and was the house which strangers never forgot.  There was always a new book, or a new print, or a new flower, or a new thought which the untiring mind had just been shaping; and there were always and ever the welcome and the sympathy of a man who loved men because he loved God, and who loved God with an affection as personal in its nature as the affection with which he loved a man.

Year after year, classes of young men went away from this college, having for four years looked on the light of this goodness.  Said I not well that few lives have ever been lived which have left such a stamp on a community?  No man could be so gross that he would utterly fail to feel its purity, no man so stupid that he could not see its grandeur of self-sacrifice; and to souls of a fibre fine enough to be touched to the quick by its exaltation, it was-a kindling fire for ever.

In the twenty-seventh year of her married life, and near the end of the twenty-fifth year of her confinement to her room, Mrs. Dorrance died.  For a few months after her death, her husband seemed like a man suddenly struck blind in the midst of familiar objects.  He seemed to be groping his way, to have lost all plan of daily life, so tremendous was the change involved in the withdrawal of this perpetual burden.  Just as he was beginning to recover the natural tone of his mind, and to resume his old habits of work, his son sickened and died.  The young man had never