dependent on her sweet offices for the rest of his life, if she, in
her womanly mercy, would love him and help him bear his burdens.

When his tender words fell upon Lyddy's dazed brain she sank beside
his chair, and, clasping his knees, sobbed: "I love you, I cannot
help loving you, I cannot help telling you I love you! But you must
hear the truth, you have heard it from others, but perhaps they
softened it. If I marry you, people will always blame me and pity
you. You would never ask me to be your wife if you could see my
face; you could not love me an instant if you were not blind."

"Then I thank God unceasingly for my infirmity," said Anthony Croft,
as he raised her to her feet.


Anthony and Lyddy Croft sat in the apple orchard, one warm day in
late spring.

Anthony's work would have puzzled a casual on-looker. Ten stout
wires were stretched between two trees, fifteen or twenty feet apart,
and each group of five represented the lines of the musical staff.
Wooden bars crossed the wires at regular intervals, dividing the
staff into measures. A box with many compartments sat on a stool
beside him, and this held bits of wood that looked like pegs, but
were in reality whole, half, quarter, and eighth notes, rests, flats,
sharps, and the like. These were cleft in such a way that he could
fit them on the wires almost as rapidly as his musical theme came to
him, and Lyddy had learned to transcribe with pen and ink the music
she found in wood and wire. He could write only simple airs in this
way, but when he played them on the violin they were transported into