secretly repined because her buoyant youth was imprisoned with his torpid age, if ever while slumbering beside him a treacherous dream had admitted another into her heart,—­yet the sick man had been preparing a revenge which the dead now claimed.  On his painful pillow he had cast a spell around her; his groans and misery had proved more captivating charms than gayety and youthful grace; in his semblance Disease itself had won the Rosebud for a bride, nor could his death dissolve the nuptials.  By that indissoluble bond she had gained a home in every sick-chamber, and nowhere else; there were her brethren and sisters; thither her husband summoned her with that voice which had seemed to issue from the grave of Toothaker.  At length she recognized her destiny.

We have beheld her as the maid, the wife, the widow; now we see her in a separate and insulated character:  she was in all her attributes Nurse Toothaker.  And Nurse Toothaker alone, with her own shrivelled lips, could make known her experience in that capacity.  What a history might she record of the great sicknesses in which she has gone hand in hand with the exterminating angel!  She remembers when the small-pox hoisted a red banner on almost every house along the street.  She has witnessed when the typhus fever swept off a whole household, young and old, all but a lonely mother, who vainly shrieked to follow her last loved one.  Where would be Death’s triumph if none lived to weep?  She can speak of strange maladies that have broken out as if spontaneously, but were found to have been imported from foreign lands with rich silks and other merchandise, the costliest portion of the cargo.  And once, she recollects, the people died of what was considered a new pestilence, till the doctors traced it to the ancient grave of a young girl who thus caused many deaths a hundred years after her own burial.  Strange that such black mischief should lurk in a maiden’s grave!  She loves to tell how strong men fight with fiery fevers, utterly refusing to give up their breath, and how consumptive virgins fade out of the world, scarcely reluctant, as if their lovers were wooing them to a far country.—­Tell us, thou fearful woman; tell us the death-secrets.  Fain would I search out the meaning of words faintly gasped with intermingled sobs and broken sentences half-audibly spoken between earth and the judgment-seat.

An awful woman!  She is the patron-saint of young physicians and the bosom-friend of old ones.  In the mansions where she enters the inmates provide themselves black garments; the coffin-maker follows her, and the bell tolls as she comes away from the threshold.  Death himself has met her at so many a bedside that he puts forth his bony hand to greet Nurse Toothaker.  She is an awful woman.  And oh, is it conceivable that this handmaid of human infirmity and affliction—­so darkly stained, so thoroughly imbued with all that is saddest in the doom of mortals—­can ever again be bright and gladsome even though bathed in the sunshine of eternity?  By her long communion with woe has she not forfeited her inheritance of immortal joy?  Does any germ of bliss survive within her?