side.  But whatever the young girl may have thought of her new neighbor she never seemed for a moment to forget the poor little friend who had been taken from her side.  There are women, and even girls, with whom it is of no use to talk.  One might as well reason with a bee as to the form of his cell, or with an oriole as to the construction of his swinging nest, as try to stir these creatures from their own way of doing their own work.  It was not a question with Iris, whether she was entitled by any special relation or by the fitness of things to play the part of a nurse.  She was a wilful creature that must have her way in this matter.  And it so proved that it called for much patience and long endurance to carry through the duties, say rather the kind offices, the painful pleasures, which she had chosen as her share in the household where accident had thrown her.  She had that genius of ministration which is the special province of certain women, marked even among their helpful sisters by a soft, low voice, a quiet footfall, a light hand, a cheering smile, and a ready self-surrender to the objects of their care, which such trifles as their own food, sleep, or habits of any kind never presume to interfere with.  Day after day, and too often through the long watches of the night, she kept her place by the pillow.

That girl will kill herself over me, Sir,—­said the poor Little Gentleman to me, one day,—­she will kill herself, Sir, if you don’t call in all the resources of your art to get me off as soon as may be.  I shall wear her out, Sir, with sitting in this close chamber and watching when she ought to be sleeping, if you leave me to the care of Nature without dosing me.

This was rather strange pleasantry, under the circumstances.  But there are certain persons whose existence is so out of parallel with the larger laws in the midst of which it is moving, that life becomes to them as death and death as life.—­How am I getting along?—­he said, another morning.  He lifted his shrivelled hand, with the death’s-head ring on it, and looked at it with a sad sort of complacency.  By this one movement, which I have seen repeatedly of late, I know that his thoughts have gone before to another condition, and that he is, as it were, looking back on the infirmities of the body as accidents of the past.  For, when he was well, one might see him often looking at the handsome hand with the flaming jewel on one of its fingers.  The single well-shaped limb was the source of that pleasure which in some form or other Nature almost always grants to her least richly endowed children.  Handsome hair, eyes, complexion, feature, form, hand, foot, pleasant voice, strength, grace, agility, intelligence,—­how few there are that have not just enough of one at least of these gifts to show them that the good Mother, busy with her millions of children, has not quite forgotten them!  But now he was thinking of that other state, where, free from all mortal impediments, the memory of his sorrowful burden should be only as that of the case he has shed to the insect whose “deep-damasked wings” beat off the golden dust of the lily-anthers, as he flutters in the ecstasy of his new life over their full-blown summer glories.