Next day began the treatment--no easy matter, as my mother’s extreme weakness made it necessary to proceed with the utmost precaution, and Count Szápary afterwards owned that he had more than once feared that she might die while undergoing it. But he persevered, and was rewarded at the end of six months by perceiving a faint twitching in the toes of the till then apparently lifeless foot. “Ah! you will be able to walk again after all!” he exclaimed in his delight, and continued the massage so vigorously and to such good purpose, that life seemed to return gradually to the whole of the paralysed limb, and in the course of a few weeks the patient could actually take a few steps. Only a very few at first, leaning on her companion’s arm, and with the tears streaming down her cheeks with the effort and the pain, sometimes severe enough to make her faint away before it was over. But through it all she could see us watching her, the first time she was taken into the garden, and she told us afterwards of our anxious faces, mine flushed with excitement as I ran towards her, whilst Wilhelm turned deadly pale as he tried to move away every little pebble in her way in the path. Then, a few days later, Otto also was allowed to look on, and for him it was something even more solemn and wonderful, for it was the first time in his life that he had seen his mother able to walk a step. Without a word he went up to her, took her by the hand, and walked slowly beside her the whole time, in perfect silence. For all of us it was the grandest and most impressive event of our whole childhood, something that seemed to partake of the nature of a miracle, and that brought the stories of miraculous cures in times of old quite near to us, making them a more living reality than to most people, since we had ourselves with our own eyes witnessed something similar in the person of one so near and dear to us. It will readily be believed, that our admiration and gratitude for him who had wrought this marvel knew no bounds. To say that we looked upon him as a saint, seems but a feeble expression of the feeling of veneration with which we regarded him.