Thus he came to discover in himself a root of interest in the boy. When the child was three years old, he induced his sister to come to Boston to consult a famous physician. “She is dying of no disease,” he told the doctor irritably. “She had fine health. That ailing fellow wore it all out. He was a heavy burden. She carried everything--for years. She spent almost all her property on him: it was not trusteed; it is nearly gone; I couldn’t help it. She has spent herself in the same way. She is that kind of woman.” “I have seen such,” replied the physician gently, “but not too many of them. I may as well tell you at the outset that I can probably do nothing for her.” Nor could he. She lingered, smiling and quiet, in her brother’s house for a few months; then begged to be taken home. Fires were kindled in the mountain cottage, and the affectionate villagers brought in their house-plants to welcome her; and there, on the morning after her return, they found her with her cheek turned upon the soft curls of the child’s head. The boy was asleep. But he waked when he was spoken to. It was his uncle who took him from his mother’s arms. They buried her beside her husband; and her husband’s people wept about her grave, for they had loved this strange and gentle lady; and they cut their white geraniums and heliotrope to bring to the funeral, and sighed when they saw the cottage under the pine grove stripped and closed. For the boy was taken to the home of his mother’s girlhood, and reared there as she had been; delicately, and as became a lad of gentle birth, who will do what is expected of him, and live like the rest of his world. III. It had always been considered a mistake that the Professors’ houses stood on the “morning side” of the street. But this, like many another architectural or social criticism, was of more interest to the critic than to the criticised. In point of fact, the western faces of the dwellings consecrated to the Faculty received the flood tide of the sea of sun that rose and ebbed between Cesarea and Wachusett. A man’s study, a child’s nursery, a woman’s sewing-room, fled the front of the house as a matter of course; and the “afternoon side” of the dwelling welcomed them bountifully. As Professor Carruth had been heard to say, that side of the street on which a man is born may determine his character and fate beyond repeal. The observation, if true, is tenfold truer of a woman, to whom a house is a shell, a prison, or a chrysalis.