A common observer would have simply said: "I should not have taken him for a praying man." He was still upon his knees when Dr. Dare's order came, "Nurse wanted for a bad case!" and he went from his prayer to his first patient. The day was already deep, and a reflection, not of the sunrise, moved with him as light moves. Doctor Dare, in her gray dress, herself a little pale, met him with keen eyes. She said: "It is a _very_ bad case. An old man--much neglected. No one will go. Are you willing?" The nurse answered: "I am glad." She watched him as he walked away--a plain, clean, common man, with unheroic carriage. The physician's fine eyes fired. To Doctor Frank, who had happened in, she said: "He will do the work of ten." "His strength was as the strength of ten, Because his heart was pure," quoted the young man, laughing lightly. "I don't know that I should have thought it, in this case. You've taken a fancy to the fellow." "I always respect an unmixed motive when I see it," she replied, shortly. "But I've been in practice too long to take sudden fancies. There is no profession like ours, Doctor, for putting the sympathies under double picket guard." She stiffened a little in her manner. She did not like to be thought an over-enthusiastic woman--womanish, unused to the world. The weather, soon after the arrival of the _Mercy_, took a terrible mood, and a prolonged drought settled upon Calhoun. The days dawned lurid and long. The nights fell dewless and deadly. Fatal and beautiful colors lurked in the swamps, and in the sifting dust, fine and hard, blown by siroccos across the glare of noon, like sands on the shores of the Lake of Fire. The pestilence walked in darkness, and the destruction wasted at midday. Men died, in that little town of a few thousand souls, at the rate of a score a day--black and white, poor and rich, clean and foul, saint and sinner. The quarantine laws tightened. Vessels fled by the harbor mouth under full sail, and melted like helpless compassion upon the fiery horizon. Trains upon the Shore Line shot through and thundered past the station; they crowded on steam; the fireman and his stoker averted their faces as they whirled by. The world turned her back upon Calhoun, and the dying town was shut in with her dead. Only, at long intervals, the _Mercy_, casting anchor far down the channel, sent up by Scip, the weak, black boatman, the signs of human fellowship--food, physician, purse, medicine--that spoke from the heart of the North to the heart of the South, and upheld her in those well-remembered days.