They protested that she could not bear the light, but the windows were opened.  Doctor Newton came to the bedside of the helpless girl, delivered a short, fervent prayer, put his arm under her shoulders, and bade her sit up.  She had not moved for two years, and the family were alarmed, but she obeyed, and he assisted her into a chair.  Sensation came back to her limbs.  With his assistance she even made a feeble attempt to walk.  He left then, saying that she would gradually improve, and in time be well, though probably never very strong.  On the same day he healed a boy, crippled and drawn with fever.

It turned out as he had said.  Olivia Langdon improved steadily, and now at twenty-two, though not robust—­she was never that—­she was comparatively well.  Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol, and Samuel Clemens joined in their worship from the moment of that first meeting.

Olivia Langdon, on her part, was at first dazed and fascinated, rather than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike any one she had ever known.  Her life had been circumscribed, her experiences of a simple sort.  She had never seen anything resembling him before.  Indeed, nobody had.  Somewhat carelessly, even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather than observantly, attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than cultured, of speech—­a blazing human solitaire, unfashioned, unset, tossed by the drift of fortune at her feet.  He disturbed rather than gratified her.  She sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward life—­to her always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of religion.  When he had gone she somehow had the feeling that a great fiery meteor of unknown portent had swept across her sky.

To her brother, who was eager for her approval of his celebrity, Miss Langdon conceded admiration.  As for her father, he did not qualify his opinion.  With hearty sense of humor, and a keen perception of verity and capability in men, Jervis Langdon accepted Samuel Clemens from the start, and remained his stanch admirer and friend.  Clemens left that night with an invitation to visit Elmira by and by, and with the full intention of going—­soon.  Fate, however, had another plan.  He did not see Elmira for the better part of a year.

He saw Miss Langdon again within the week.  On New-Year’s Day he set forth to pay calls, after the fashion of the time—­more lavish then than now.  Miss Langdon was receiving with Miss Alice Hooker, a niece of Henry Ward Beecher, at the home of a Mrs. Berry; he decided to go there first.  With young Langdon he arrived at eleven o’clock in the morning, and they did not leave until midnight.  If his first impression upon Olivia Langdon had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to her as a streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon.  One thing is certain:  she had