I lay thus, not impatiently, for above a fortnight. I regained strength very slowly; the least effort or exertion was sure to overcome me. But I wished for none; and as I lay there, gazing for whole days long at a great coat-of-arms over the end of the gallery, where a huge double-headed eagle seemed to me screaming in the agony of strangulation, but yet never to be choked outright, I revelled in many a strange rambling as to the fate of the land of which it was the emblem and the shield. Doubtless some remnant of my passionate assault on Austria lingered in my brain, and gave this turn to its operations. My nurse was one of that sisterhood whose charities call down many a blessing on the Church that organizes their benevolences. She was what is called a _graue Schwester_; and of a truth she seemed the incarnation of grayness. It was not her dress alone, but her face and hands, her noiseless gait, her undemonstrative stare, her half-husky whisper, and her monotonous ways, had all a sort of pervading grayness that enveloped her, just as a cloud mist wraps a landscape. There was, besides, a kind of fog-like indistinctness in her few and muttered words that made a fitting atmosphere of drowsy uniformity for the sick-room. Her first care, on my recovery, was to supply me with a number of little religious books,--lives of saints and martyrs, accounts of miracles, and narratives of holy pilgrimages,--and I devoured them with all the zest of a devotee. They seemed to supply the very excitement my mind craved for, and the good soul little suspected how much more she was ministering to a love for the marvellous than to a spirit of piety. In the “Flowers of St. Francis,” for instance, I found an adventure-seeker after my own heart To be sure, his search was after sinners in need of a helping hand to rescue them; but as his contests with Satan were described as stand-up encounters, with very hard knocks on each side, they were just as exciting combats to read of, as any I had ever perused in stories of chivalry.