and sickly woman begins with a miscarriage it is not unusual to see her go through a series of such pregnancies as Ursula Minoret did, in spite of the care and watchfulness and science of her husband.  The poor man often blamed himself for their mutual persistence in desiring children.  The last child, born after a rest of nearly two years, died in 1792, a victim of its mother’s nervous condition—­if we listen to physiologists, who tell us that in the inexplicable phenomenon of generation the child derives from the father by blood and from the mother in its nervous system.

Compelled to renounce the joys of a feeling all powerful within him, the doctor turned to benevolence as a substitute for his denied paternity.  During his married life, thus cruelly disappointed, he had longed more especially for a fair little daughter, a flower to bring joy to the house; he therefore gladly accepted Joseph Mirouet’s legacy, and gave to the orphan all the hopes of his vanished dreams.  For two years he took part, as Cato for Pompey, in the most minute particulars of Ursula’s life; he would not allow the nurse to suckle her or to take her up or put her to bed without him.  His medical science and his experience were all put to use in her service.  After going through many trials, alternations of hope and fear, and the joys and labors of a mother, he had the happiness of seeing this child of the fair German woman and the French singer a creature of vigorous health and profound sensibility.

With all the eager feelings of a mother the happy old man watched the growth of the pretty hair, first down, then silk, at last hair, fine and soft and clinging to the fingers that caressed it.  He often kissed the little naked feet the toes of which, covered with a pellicle through which the blood was seen, were like rosebuds.  He was passionately fond of the child.  When she tried to speak, or when she fixed her beautiful blue eyes upon some object with that serious, reflective look which seems the dawn of thought, and which she ended with a laugh, he would stay by her side for hours, seeking, with Jordy’s help, to understand the reasons (which most people call caprices) underlying the phenomena of this delicious phase of life, when childhood is both flower and fruit, a confused intelligence, a perpetual movement, a powerful desire.

Ursula’s beauty and gentleness made her so dear to the doctor that he would have liked to change the laws of nature in her behalf.  He declared to old Jordy that his teeth ached when Ursula was cutting hers.  When old men love children there is no limit to their passion —­they worship them.  For these little beings they silence their own manias or recall a whole past in their service.  Experience, patience, sympathy, the acquisitions of life, treasures laboriously amassed, all are spent upon that young life in which they live again; their intelligence does actually take the place of motherhood.  Their wisdom, ever on the alert, is equal to the intuition