Being a good friend, Judy was, by consequence, an equally good nurse. The attributes of the two are indeed strangely akin, if the latter be not a natural development of the former. For in sickness, as in sorrow, there are times when a sympathetic silence is a better restorative than more obtrusive remedies. Her master found it so when Judy nursed him for four months at a stretch, sacrificing without a whine the most brilliant summer on record. Cleverer than many a nurse or doctor, she inferred his condition from certain changes of face and expression, unappreciable by their less intuitive faculties. Satisfied by a careful inspection that he was for the moment improving, she would fall back on the pillow with a sigh of satisfaction, till he was restless again, or till the time came—she knew it as well as did the nurse—when he had to be roused for his medicine. Judy was sorry, I fancy, on her own account when the days of her nursing were ended by her master’s recovery. For she never disguised her real sentiments, whether creditable or the reverse, differing therein from the race of men, at whose feelings and motives one can only hazard a bewildered guess. Judy taught her master many things: among them how to win the love of her community. Jealousy, it seems, is the family failing. It is idle, she told him, to imagine that a few scraps of half-hearted affection can claim the devotion of a life. Careless, casual attentions may gratify an unexacting dog; they can never win his heart’s love. It is not for pity’s sake, as some will tell you, that the mongrel of the streets is attracted by preference to the vagabond and outcast, who is as lonely as himself; rather, because he feels that here at any rate is a field unoccupied, a mine of sympathy that will royally repay for working. But let the master of his affection form other and more engrossing ties, and the love that he has given he will infallibly withdraw—not hastily, capriciously, or for the moment, but slowly, deliberately, and for ever—at what cost to himself is happily not ours to fathom. III “They sin who tell as love can die.” SOUTHEY. Retrieved by Judy from a life of shame, her master had become a respectable character, and the year afterwards found work as a carpenter in an adjoining town, which compelled him to migrate from our village.