My pale, attenuated boy, too, was changed into the round, ruddy young soldier, looking particularly well in his uniform. As is so frequently the case in typhoid fevers, he had gained flesh rapidly, as he recovered, and felt all the buoyancy and brightness of a thorough convalescence. I could not avoid comparing and contrasting the two cases. Both brought in with the same disease; in the same apparently hopeless state; the same surprise excited by the recovery of each; but here the parallel ceased. The one, scarcely more than a child,--a beardless boy, with smooth, polished brow, rising with all the vigor of youth from this terrible illness, and throwing off the disease as completely as though it had never touched him. The other, worn and scarred by life’s conflicts more than by time; his brow deeply furrowed more by excess than years; his hair prematurely whitened, rising, it is true, from the disease, but how?--without spirit, energy, or any sort of spring; wearily dragging one foot after the other; listlessly and languidly sitting hour after hour upon his bed, scarcely noticing or speaking to any one. His time of life would of necessity give a slower convalescence, but there was far more against him than this: a constitution broken and ruined, as we soon found, by bad habits, which he renewed as soon as permitted to go out, producing, of course, a relapse. Long before I knew this, I was conscious that I could never overcome my repugnance to the man; at first I attributed the feeling to the extreme dread of him I had felt at our first meeting, and which I could not forget; but I soon became convinced that there was a stronger reason. If inward purity writes itself upon the outward form, (and who can question that it does?) the converse is equally true. There is a sort of instinct, or rather--for that is too low a term--a sort of spiritual consciousness, which warns us when evil is near; that part of our being puts forth feelers, as it were, moral antennæ, which extend themselves in congenial soil, but recoil at the touch of corruption of any sort.