Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart.  So says the great medical authority, Laennec.  Incurable cases of this kind used to find their hospitals in convents.  We have the disease in New England,—­but not the hospitals.  I don’t like to think of it.  I will not believe our young Iris is going to die out in this way.  Providence will find her some great happiness, or affliction, or duty,—­and which would be best for her, I cannot tell.  One thing is sure:  the interest she takes in her little neighbor is getting to be more engrossing than ever.  Something is the matter with him, and she knows it, and I think worries herself about it.

I wonder sometimes how so fragile and distorted a frame has kept the fiery spirit that inhabits it so long its tenant.  He accounts for it in his own way.

The air of the Old World is good for nothing, he said, one day.—­Used up, Sir,—­breathed over and over again.  You must come to this side, Sir, for an atmosphere fit to breathe nowadays.  Did not worthy Mr. Higginson say that a breath of New England’s air is better than a sup of Old England’s ale?  I ought to have died when I was a boy, Sir; but I could n’t die in this Boston air,—­and I think I shall have to go to New York one of these days, when it’s time for me to drop this bundle,—­or to New Orleans, where they have the yellow fever,—­or to Philadelphia, where they have so many doctors.

This was some time ago; but of late he has seemed, as I have before said, to be ailing.  An experienced eye, such as I think I may call mine, can tell commonly whether a man is going to die, or not, long before he or his friends are alarmed about him.  I don’t like it.

Iris has told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her family, and that she is afraid she has it.  Those who are so endowed look upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him.  According to the degree to which it covers him, his death will be near or more remote.  It is an awful faculty; but science gives one too much like it.  Luckily for our friends, most of us who have the scientific second-sight school ourselves not to betray our knowledge by word or look.

Day by day, as the Little Gentleman comes to the table, it seems to me that the shadow of some approaching change falls darker and darker over his countenance.  Nature is struggling with something, and I am afraid she is under in the wrestling-match.  You do not care much, perhaps, for my particular conjectures as to the nature of his difficulty.  I should say, however, from the sudden flushes to which he is subject, and certain other marks which, as an expert, I know how to interpret, that his heart was in trouble; but then he presses his hand to the right side, as if there were the centre of his uneasiness.

When I say difficulty about the heart, I do not mean any of those sentimental maladies of that organ which figure more largely in romances than on the returns which furnish our Bills of Mortality.  I mean some actual change in the organ itself, which may carry him off by slow and painful degrees, or strike him down with one huge pang and only time for a single shriek,—­as when the shot broke through the brave Captain Nolan’s breast, at the head of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and with a loud cry he dropped dead from his saddle.