A good many stops, but will get to the station by and by." So the doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of Jupiter before it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader, as you will see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed, saying he would look in occasionally.After this, the Latin tutor began the usual course of "getting better," until he got so much better that his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines showed at each side of his lips, and when he spoke; it was in a muffled whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the purest porcelain,--so much better, that he hoped--by spring--he----might be able--to--attend------to his class again.--But he was recommended not to expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and occasionally, not having anything to do, his bed.The unmarried sister with whom he lived took care of him; and the child, now old enough to be manageable and even useful in trifling offices, sat in the chamber, or played, about.
Things could not go on so forever, of course.One morning his face was sunken and his hands were very, very cold.He was "better," he whispered, but sadly and faintly.After a while he grew restless and seemed a little wandering.His mind ran on his classics, and fell back on the Latin grammar.
"Iris! " he said,--",filiola mea!"--The child knew this meant my dear little daughter as well as if it had been English.--"Rainbow!
"for he would translate her name at times,--"come to me,--veni"--and his lips went on automatically, and murmured," vel venito!" --The child came and sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could not warm, but which shot its rays of cold all through her slender frame.But there she sat, looking steadily at him.Presently he opened his lips feebly, and whispered, "Moribundus." She did not know what that meant, but she saw that there was something new and sad.So she began to cry; but presently remembering an old book that seemed to comfort him at times, got up and brought a Bible in the Latin version, called the Vulgate."Open it," he said,--"I will read, segnius irritant,--don't put the light out,--ah! hoeret lateri,--I am going,--vale, vale, vale, goodbye, good-bye,--the Lord take care of my child! Domine, audi-- vel audito!" His face whitened suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes and mouth.He had taken his last degree.
--Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very brilliant rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view.A limited wardrobe of man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good books, principally classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of the Pantheon, with some pieces of furniture which had seen service,--these, and a child's heart full of tearful recollections and strange doubts and questions, alternating with the cheap pleasures which are the anodynes of childish grief; such were the treasures she inherited.--No,--I forgot.With that kindly sentiment which all of us feel for old men's first children,--frost-flowers of the early winter season, the old tutor's students had remembered him at a time when he was laughing and crying with his new parental emotions, and running to the side of the plain crib in which his alter egg, as he used to say, was swinging, to hang over the little heap of stirring clothes, from which looked the minute, red, downy, still, round face, with unfixed eyes and working lips,--in that unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a smile, and which gives to the earliest moon-year or two of an infant's life the character of a first old age, to counterpoise that second childhood which there is one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by.The boys had remembered the old man and young father at that tender period of his hard, dry life.
There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with classical figures, and bearing on a shield the graver words, Ex dono pupillorum.The handle on its side showed what use the boys had meant it for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its destination.Out of this silver vessel, after a long, desperate, strangling cry, which marked her first great lesson in the realities of life, the child took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and their children get, tempered with water, and sweetened a little, so as to bring it nearer the standard established by the touching indulgence and partiality of Nature,--who had mingled an extra allowance of sugar in the blameless food of the child at its mother's breast, as compared with that of its infant brothers and sisters of the bovine race.
But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rainwater.An air-plant will grow by feeding on the winds.Nay, those huge forests that overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from the air-currents with which they are always battling.The oak is but a foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that holds the future vegetable world in solution.The storm that tears its leaves has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the tornado clad in the spoils of a hundred hurricanes.
Poor little Iris! What had she in common with the great oak in the shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like that,--this was all.The blue milk ran into her veins and filled them with thin, pure blood.Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge, such as the white rosebud shows before it opens.The doctor who had attended her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to "raise " her,--"delicate child,"--hoped she was not consumptive,--thought there was a fair chance she would take after her father.