At this instant came the crash, and I knew nothing more until I heard people remonstrating with Kate for persisting in trying to revive a dead man, (myself,) while the blood was flowing profusely from her own wound.  I heard her indignantly deny that I was dead, and, with her customary irritability, tell them that they ought to be ashamed of themselves for saying so.  They still insisted that I was “a perfect jelly,” and could not possibly survive, even if I came to consciousness.  She contradicted them energetically.  Yet they pardoned, and liked her.  They knew that a fond heart keenly resents evil prophecies of its beloved ones.  Besides, whatever she does or says, people always like Kate.

After a physician arrived, it was found that the jellying of my flesh was not the worst of it; for, in consequence of some injury to my spine, my lower limbs were paralyzed.  My sister, thank Heaven, had received only a slight cut upon the forehead.

Of course I don’t mean to bore you with a recital of all my sufferings through those winter months.  I don’t ask your compassion for such trifles as bodily pain; but for what I am, and must forever be in this life, my own heart aches for pity.  Let yours sympathize with it.

I thought to be so active, so useful, perhaps so distinguished as a man, so blest as husband and father!—­for you must know how from my boyhood up I have craved, what I have never had, a home.

Now that I have been thrust out of active life and forced to make up my mind to perfect passiveness, I have become a bugbear to myself.  I cannot endure the thought of ever being the peevish egotist, the exacting tyrant, which men are apt to become when they are thrown upon woman’s love and long-suffering, as I am.

My only safeguard is, I believe, to keep up interests out of myself, and I beg of you to help me.  I believe implicitly in your expressed desire to be of some service to me, and I ask you to undertake the troublesome task of correspondence with a sick man, and almost a stranger.  I will, however, try to make you acquainted with myself and my surroundings, so thoroughly that the latter difficulty will soon be obviated.

First, let me present my sister,—­named Catalina,—­called Kate, Catty, or Lina, according to the fancy of the moment, or the degree of sentimentality in the speaker.  You have not seen her since she was a child, so that, of course, you cannot imagine her as she is now.  But you know the circumstances in which our parents left us.  You remember, that, after living all his life in careless luxury, my father died penniless.  Our mother had secured her small fortune for Kate; and at her death, just before my father’s, she gave me—­an infant a few weeks old—­into my sister’s young arms, with full trust that I should be taken care of by her.  You know of all my obligations to her in my babyhood and for my education, which she drudged at teaching for years to obtain for me.  I could never repay her for such devotion, but I hoped to make her forget all her trials, and only retain the happy consciousness of having had the making of such a famous man!  I expected to place her in affluence, at least.