independently of all modes and customs, opened the curtain in the manner an old friend and brother officer would have done it, and asked him how he did; how he had rested in the night; what was his complaint; where was his pain, and what could he do to help him? and without giving him time to answer any one of the inquiries, went on and told him of the little plan which he had been concerting with the corporal, the night before, for him.

“You shall go home directly, LeFevre,” said my uncle Toby, “to my house, and we’ll send for a doctor to see what’s the matter, and we’ll have an apothecary, and the corporal shall be your nurse and I’ll be your servant, LeFevre.”

There was a frankness in my Uncle Toby, not the effect of familiarity, but the cause of it, which let you at once into his soul and showed you the goodness of his nature; to this, there was something in his looks, and voice, and manner superadded, which eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to come and take shelter under him; so that before my uncle Toby had half finished the kind offers he was making to the father, had the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and had taken hold of the breast of his coat and was pulling it toward him.  The blood and spirits of LeFevre, which were waxing cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their last citadel, the heart, rallied back, the film forsook his eyes for a moment, and he looked up wishfully in my uncle Toby’s face, then cast a look upon his boy, and that ligament, fine as it was, was never broken.

Nature instantly ebbed again; the film returned to its place; the pulse fluttered—­stopped—­went on—­throbbed—­stopped again—­moved—­stopped—­shall I go on?  No.

* * * * *

XXIII.

STEPHEN GIRARD

(BORN 1750—­DIED 1831.)

THE NAPOLEON OF MERCHANTS—­HIS LIFE SUCCESSFUL, AND YET A FAILURE.

Imagine the figure of an old man, low in stature, squarely built, clumsily dressed, and standing on large feet.  To this uncouth form, add a repulsive face, wrinkled, cold, colorless, and stony, with one eye dull and the other blind—­a “wall-eye.”  His expression is that of a man wrapped in the mystery of his own hidden thoughts.  He looks—­

    “Like monumental bronze, unchanged his look—­
    A soul which pity never touched or shook—­
    Trained, from his lowly cradle to his bier,
    The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook
    Unchanging, fearing but the charge of fear—­
    A stoic of the mart, a man without a tear.”

Such a man was Stephen Girard, one of the most distinguished merchants in the annals of commerce, and the founder of the celebrated Girard College in Philadelphia.  Let us briefly trace his history and observe his character.

Girard was a Frenchman by birth, born in the environs of Bordeaux, in May, 1750, of obscure parents.  His early instruction was very limited; and, being deformed by a wall-eye, he was an object of ridicule to the companions of his boyhood.  This treatment, as is supposed by his biographer, soured his temper, made him shrink from society, and led him to live among his own thoughts rather than in mental communion with his fellows.