sat by his side in the winter evenings and supplemented his weakness,
helping and learning alternately, while his blind master's skill
filled him with wonder and despair. The years of struggle for
perfection had not been wasted; and though the eye that once detected
the deviation of a hair's breadth could no longer tell the true from
the false, yet nature had been busy with her divine work of
compensation. The one sense stricken with death, she poured floods
of new life and vigour into the others. Touch became something more
than the stupid, empty grasp of things we seeing mortals know, and in
place of the two eyes he had lost he now had ten in every finger-tip.
As for odours, let other folk be proud of smelling musk and lavender,
but let him tell you by a quiver of the nostrils the various kinds of
so-called scentless flowers, and let him bend his ear and interpret
secrets that the universe is ever whispering to us who are pent in
partial deafness because, forsooth, we see.

He often paused to hear Lydia's low, soothing tones and the boy's
weak treble. Anthony had said to him once, "Miss Butterfield is very
beautiful, isn't she, Davy? You haven't painted me a picture of her
yet. How does she look?"

Davy was stricken at first with silent embarrassment. He was a
truthful child, but in this he could no more have told the whole
truth than he could have cut off his hand. He was knit to Lyddy by
every tie of gratitude and affection. He would sit for hours with
his expectant face pressed against the window-pane, and when he saw
her coming down the shady road he was filled with a sense of
impending comfort and joy.

"No," he said hesitatingly, "she isn't pretty, nunky, but she's sweet